Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: The E on May 30, 2013, 03:56:37 am
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For those of you living under a rock, about a year ago, journalist Anita Sarkeesian made a kickstarter to fund a series of videos to examine examples of casual and pervasive misogynism in games.
The internet promptly exploded, with gamers rising up to claim that no such problem exists, and if it existed (which it doesn't, don'tchaknow?), it's not that bad, and even if it were that bad (which it isn't, because IT'S NOT EXISTING, DIDN'T YOU LISTEN?), it's not like it would do much damage, cos it's just games, right? Right?
Hatemail was written, sites were DDOSed, games about punching Ms Sarkeesian in the face were made, and then the internet kinda forgot about it all. Ms Sarkeesian gave a TEDtalk about her experiences as being on the receiving end of the Internet hate machine (http://tedxwomen.org/speakers/anita-sarkeesian-2/).
Now, the series has started to be broadcast on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn4ob_5_ttEaA_vc8F3fjzE62esf9yP61), starting off with an examination of the various ways in which the old "Damsel in Distress" plot device is used, and what kind of (in most cases hopefully unintended) message it sends.
Now, while I personally would have liked her to go more in depth in specific games, or on the topic in general, these videos are still very nice primer material to get one started on these topics.
They've also once again drawn out the very worst comments ever seen on the internet, with the second video having been flagged as hate speech on youtube (which was then subject to an automated takedown, but has since been restored), Ms Sarkeesian drawing fire for disallowing comments on the yt page, and various pieces of metacommentary about how bvad these things are, how wrong Ms Sarkeesian is, and HOW THAT WOMAN SHOULD LEARN HER PLACE AND GET BACK TO THE KITCHEN!
What are your thoughts on the matter?
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Strangely, if anything, I actually noticed less misogynism in games than in other genres. In many cases, you can play as a woman just as well as a man (funnily enough, I do so frequently in games like TES and it's ilk, because I like their stat bonuses better :)). In many cases, the protagonist is completely faceless and genderless, and you can't really blame military shooters for featuring a male protagonist (though now that women are allowed into combat in the US military, I'd really like to see a subversion of that trend). This might be the kind of games I play, but "Damsel in Distress" seems to be rarely used completely straight. Then there's the subject of fanservice, which still is primarily aimed at males, but this is prevalent across every genres, save those specifically aimed at women.
Regarding the reactions on the internet, I think that this proves there's no problem with misogynism in games, but there might be such problem with (some of the) people who play those games.
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This is the best primer available, but I hesitate to call it good.
I don't doubt the problems exist, I've seen them, but I have reservations about both the presentation (shallow level of analysis, sometimes incorrect details, odd selection methodology or lack thereof) and the presenter (I've seen some lucid commentary on donations that worries me) here.
As not everyone has a wife who'll offer unsolicited commentary on how bad the TOR romances are from a feminist viewpoint and yet hilarious then this is probably a decent place to start.
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Did you have to post this godawful video video? But whatever, I'll be serious now. The thing is, Anita Sarkeesian is a ****wit. Instead of trying to actually go and do something about sexism in video games, Anita chooses to parrot the same ****ing thing people have been saying for years.
But the funny thing is, you see, is that the developers of video games aren't sexist; (usually aren't, some are unfortunately are) They're just incapable of making a decent female character, because most of them are ignorant of what women are really like, due to many development studios being primarily male-dominated. The sexism, in the sense of discrimination, however comes from the annoying horde of often both racist and sexist dudebros (of whom by the way should be involuntarily sterilized so that they may never reproduce) who unfortunately play these video games.
While I would like to elaborate on this further, there's not really much more I can say other than that this problem has been incredibly ****ing obvious for years, and that rather than blabbering on about it like Anita apparently loves to do, people who want this to go should actually do something about this, instead of again, blabbering on about it.
In short, I shall state my point in bold letters:
STOP ****ING COMPLAINING ABOUT VIDEO GAMES BEING SEXIST AND ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, YOU ****WITS. IT'S NOT GOING TO GO AWAY JUST BECAUSE YOU COMPLAINED ABOUT IT A LOT. YOU ARE AS MUCH TO BLAME AS FOR THE SEXISM AS THE OTHER SIDE IS, DUE TO YOUR INACTION.
There. I'm not going to bother responding to replies to my post until later, as I have had a enough of a stressful ****ing day as it is.
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Did you have to post this godawful video video?
Going by yours and Dragon's response, yes, I did.
EDIT:
I probably should elaborate.
Strangely, if anything, I actually noticed less misogynism in games than in other genres. In many cases, you can play as a woman just as well as a man (funnily enough, I do so frequently in games like TES and it's ilk, because I like their stat bonuses better :)). In many cases, the protagonist is completely faceless and genderless, and you can't really blame military shooters for featuring a male protagonist (though now that women are allowed into combat in the US military, I'd really like to see a subversion of that trend). This might be the kind of games I play, but "Damsel in Distress" seems to be rarely used completely straight. Then there's the subject of fanservice, which still is primarily aimed at males, but this is prevalent across every genres, save those specifically aimed at women.
Regarding the reactions on the internet, I think that this proves there's no problem with misogynism in games, but there might be such problem with (some of the) people who play those games.
Okay, so because you're not seeing implementations of the trope in your chosen genres, the trope does not matter? Tell me again how that is relevant to the point being made in the video, cos I don't see it.
I mean, if you'd actually listened to what was being said, you might have even understood why the unreflected use of this is a problem.
BritishShivans:
Thank you for providing a prime example of the kind of hilariously bad comments these videos get. Do note that using all caps and large fonts and swearwords does not actually improve your arguments. You talk about how "people should do something about this", and how they're supposed to stop whining and start doing, but I submit to you that examining these issues is a necessary first step. Ms Sarkeesian is not a game designer or game writer; as such, her ability to influence these things directly is limited to making people aware of these things and offering alternate solutions (as she does, in her capacity as a speaker at gaming conferences and as a consultant for game developers).
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Sexism is sexism whether it's by ignorance or by choice. That's exactly why it's a good thing at least someone is trying to analyze this stuff. I haven't familiarized myself with Sarkeesian's work sufficiently to have an educated opinion on the quality of the work (much less her motivations or cognitive abilities like some in this thread) but I for one applaud the effort.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that game developers are predominantly male and predominantly not sexist by choice. Don't you think it would improve their creative process to be aware of some of the tropes they've been using, whether consciously or unconsciously?
Lastly, saying that games being sexist is partly due to inaction by Sarkeesian personally (rather than female gender in general) is like saying a historian is responsible for the actions of historical figures.
And even saying that female gender is complicit to sexism in video game industry because of their inaction or lack of participation in game development or game industry in general is... dubious. Male-dominated vocations are not often appealing or even easily accessible to females... because of either open or underlying sexist attitudes.
Which is sort of why this thread exists in the first place.
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Sexism is sexism whether it's by ignorance or by choice. That's exactly why it's a good thing at least someone is trying to analyze this stuff. I haven't familiarized myself with Sarkeesian's work sufficiently to have an educated opinion on the quality of the work (much less her motivations or cognitive abilities like some in this thread) but I for one applaud the effort.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that game developers are predominantly male and predominantly not sexist by choice. Don't you think it would improve their creative process to be aware of some of the tropes they've been using, whether consciously or unconsciously?
This seems to be exactly what a lot of people seem to be overlooking. There's a lot of things (in games and otherwise) that I might not otherwise recognize as having a sexist vibe, so even shallow analysis and examples is interesting enough to me. I wouldn't want to write/design/make something sexist, but that's not because I want to be politically correct or because I want to avoid offending someone, but simply because 1) I'd rather make something that holds an appeal to both sexes and genders and 2) because good female characters and games which appeal to women are much more rare so I find them to be a much more interesting goal.
To me it's pretty irrelevant whether or not misogynism in games or other media is conscious or unconscious; it still narrows the audience and excludes people for no good reason, so I want to be aware of it so I can try to avoid it.
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Okay, so because you're not seeing implementations of the trope in your chosen genres, the trope does not matter? Tell me again how that is relevant to the point being made in the video, cos I don't see it.
I mean, if you'd actually listened to what was being said, you might have even understood why the unreflected use of this is a problem.
TBH, I wasn't really addressing the video at all, but rather the problem of misogynism in games. It's not that this trope doesn't matter, it's that I haven't seen it. By "this might be the kind of games I play", I meant that I don't usually play those small, casual games nor overpriced "big titles" like Halo, CoD or BF. Also, I have no experience with consoles, so I'm only speaking for PC titles. Yes, my point is not really related to this video, save for the fact my point addresses the same issue she's been researching (TBH, I added the last line partly because I realized that I'm not saying anything actually on-topic :)).
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No matter what you do, no matter what you say someone is going to get offended somewhere. Personally I think that these days games are a reflection of the market and the demographics that risk averse publishers are selling to.
This is where I have hopes for kickstarter as a platform for allowing for new ideas and concepts to spring up. Hopefully Female games developers will be able to tap into the obvious discontent that some people have towards sexism in gaming to raise funds for their own ideas and developments, maybe making publishers more likely to notice the alternative opportunities that exist. Some Female developers are already doing this - a case in point being Redshirt http://www.redshirtgame.com/ (http://www.redshirtgame.com/). A game developed by a woman that has all the sci-fi elements to attract the geek in me but is also designed as a social interaction game that appeals to some of the girls I know.
I think things not only can change but are changing as platforms become more accessable and gaming moves away from the "creepy guy in a corner staring at a screen image" that has stuck for so long with gamers. As much as I dislike smartphones and Tablet devices these are allowing people who did not see themselves as gamers before a chance to get in to the fun aspects of this hobby and with this will come a demand for different types of games.
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Yeah, market forces are probably the best explanation. While there are big name titles marketed for women (The Sims) and MMOs attract quite a few women thanks to the social aspect, most games are still centered around action of some kind and mostly targeted at men. This is more subtle than outright sexism, but the bias is still there.
Also, I noticed that she all but named 4Chan as the "homebase" of this hate campaign. This wouldn't be the first time they did something like that, I don't think this is really a group representing internet as a whole.
Interestingly enough, I noticed that on ArmA series forums (a military simulator, with women only appearing as civilians), not only there's very little misogyny, but there's a large group of people advocating introducing female units to the game, with equal functionality to males. Sure, it's just a single community, but I believe that an average gamer has no problem with women, it's just those who do are a very, very loud minority. Well, that, and that 4Chan crowd is a bunch of sheepish trolls willing to go with anything, the more offensive the better. This is hardly the first time 30 year olds acted like 10 year olds just because they're anonymous.
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This whole subject falls in the "humanity is unsalvageably stupid, Will Not Fix" category as far as I'm concerned.
I think there are more critical matters to fight for.
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I've never watched Anita Sarkeesian's video in question myself, but I did watch ThatOneVideoGamer's video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLMj6DMy-4U) which concerned them and the controversy they got. I'm listening through it again now, but I'm not sure which points from it I should bring up.
One of the things I do think is relevant is the mention of Japanese values being different to those in Western cultures in regards to women, and that causing problems in things like Metroid: Other M (which I haven't played but I've certainly heard about the controversy with that one). But, coming off that, I think a valid point is that any misogyny in games would hardly be constricted to that medium. Sure, maybe it's a case of video games playing catch up, but there's still problems that need to be solved in society at large in terms of gender equality, and that would be reflected in video games, certainly, but also in any other form of media. Honestly, though, while I've played games a lot, I don't have a huge library of games, and a lot of those have been games that don't really have characters as such, like the older Need For Speed games, tycoon games, and that sort of thing, so I don't have a lot of experience with female characterisation in games, at least until the last couple of years.
Also, in regards to the "Damsel in Distress" thing, there's something at the tail end of ThatOneVideoGamer's video (about 45 minutes) that I think is a decent point too - is it bad that there's some games where a female character has to be saved by a male one? That would certainly be a problem if it was exclusively "the helpless woman needs to be saved by the badass guy" or something, but that doesn't mean that no video game plot at all should involve a woman that needs to be rescued for whatever reason. I mean, it's certainly good that there are plenty of badass, or otherwise strong, women in video games, but that doesn't mean that every woman in a video game has to be able to beat everyone up, or not cry, or not wear a fancy dress, etc.
But I do agree with Herra and zookeeper here, that it doesn't mean that there aren't issues that need to be raised, and it's easy to be sexist (or any type of prejudiced, in fact) without meaning to even if you aren't consciously sexist. I'd also like to agree with zookeeper's point that I to would like to know how to write/design/make something while avoiding being sexist (and I am currently seriously toying around with story ideas of my own), just to ensure that I can make something that doesn't alienate any of the potential audience.
Maybe I should watch Anita Sarkeesian's video in the future, but hopefully I've said something relevant here. :nervous:
EDIT: Also, since I was deliberating on posting this and Dragon's new post came up:
but I believe that an average gamer has no problem with women
The reaction that Other M (which I mentioned before) got lends credence to the fact that a lot of males who play games aren't (deliberately) sexist as there was a lot of vitrol regarding Samus' characterisation.
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This whole subject falls in the "humanity is unsalvageably stupid, Will Not Fix" category as far as I'm concerned.
I think there are more critical matters to fight for.
hey matth someone mentioned you in a song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-AbB-PmPvw&t=20m)
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This whole subject falls in the "humanity is unsalvageably stupid, Will Not Fix" category as far as I'm concerned.
I think there are more critical matters to fight for.
hey matth someone mentioned you in a song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-AbB-PmPvw&t=20m)
Brilliant execution, sir.
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Sexism in computer games, I can think of 2 straight of the bat, Duke Nukem and GTA!
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Not to derail the thread, but at least in GTA it was satirical.
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and in duke nukem it was initially satirical, but then that got lost somewhere in the cluster**** that was DNF's development
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http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/remember-mes-surprising-connection-to-facebook-and-why-its-protagonist-had
That doesn't mean Nilin's sex wasn't on other people's minds, though. By the time Remember Me was shown to prospective publishers, it was too late to change Nilin from a woman to a man, and this was enough to cause potential backers to abstain from publishing the game. “We had some that said, 'Well, we don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,'” Moris told the Report.
Even if Moris had changed Nilin to be male, that solution produced its own drama. “We wanted to be able to tease on Nilin's private life, and that means for instance, at one point, we wanted a scene where she was kissing a guy,” Moris said. “We had people tell us, 'You can't make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that's going to feel awkward.'”
Publishers are the worse part of the game industry.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpwBG2Dtpmk
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idk, games are mainly targeted at male figures as I see it, which naturally seem far more attracted to those stereotypes than to any other kind of stereotype for woman. so... good luck changing that.
As for the harassment, well the internet is filled with bastards and allows them to move freely so this is kinda expected for anyone trying to make a point or change something so widespread.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpwBG2Dtpmk
I must thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Weeeeeeee booobies!
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I'll just drop this here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTGh0EMmMC8
:)
Now something on a more serious note that is directly relevant to the "damsel in distress" subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la9i2np0WTU
EDIT: He's talking about the person you are E. I didn't realise that at first until he mentioned the kickstarter. So he actually talks about the abuse too, I only remembered this vid for the stuff about the games.
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Sexism in computer games, I can think of 2 straight of the bat, Duke Nukem and GTA!
Those were both clearly satirical examples (even if DNF didn't really do it well), and as such aren't really good examples. Overlord I and II are also very sexist, but it's one of many things they parody. They were written by a woman, BTW. Rihanna Pratchett, you might have heard or her father (she inherited his sense of humor, so both games are really worth playing). Those games were never intended to be taken seriously.
Publishers are the worse part of the game industry.
Not only game, media in general. Executive meddling has spoiled a number of movies, games, TV shows, even books. That's what makes internet really great in that regard, a publisher is no longer needed to sell a book or a game. An editor, of course, is sometimes useful, but there's a fine line they really shouldn't cross.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la9i2np0WTU
EDIT: He's talking about the person you are E. I didn't realise that at first until he mentioned the kickstarter. So he actually talks about the abuse too, I only remembered this vid for the stuff about the games.
Okay. A teenager, desperate to show of his geek cred. Talking about feminism. HARDCORE FEMINISM, as he makes abundantly clear.
This is going to be good, isn't it (Not in the way you mean though, Lorric. This is going to be completely dreadful.).
His point: "There are plenty of female rolemodels in gaming".
Then he's arguing about how Ms Sarkeesian said that these do not exist (Hint: This was never said in any of the videos from the Tropes Vs Women series).
So, not only is he missing the point that was made by quite a margin, he argues against a strawman that he brought to the table. Good ****ing job.
I mean, yeah, sure, there are a few good female characters in games. Noone was disputing that, you moron. It was only the minor issue that these characters are few and far between that was under discussion.
So, Lorric. Why did you think that this was interesting? Did you post it as an example of gamers missing the point? Or did you actually think you were making a valuable contribution to this thread?
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I wanted to use it to point out that it is less few and far between than people think. Especially with him picking out older games rather than the newer ones of today where strong females are more common.
Alright then, if you're so knowledgable, why don't you come off the fence and tell us what you think?
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I'd probably have stronger feelings on this if the couple games that I played that were mentioned were games that I took the content at all seriously. Anyway, I do hope she eventually covers more tropes. I do find these videos entertaining and insightful.
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One of my favorite gender inequalities is in Ragnarok Battle Offline (some random 3 player gameplay footage of stage 1 (http://youtu.be/x2zqp5DbSX0)). You can pick a male or female version of each of the classes, they both have the same skillset but completely different animations for attacks, skills and movement. Females in general do less damage (less muscle) but tend to be more agile on the flipside.
Females aren't inferior to their Male counterpart, they are just different.
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Now something on a more serious note that is directly relevant to the "damsel in distress" subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la9i2np0WTU
...
You know that rock you were talking about The E. That was kinda' nice and cosy...
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I'll just drop this here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTGh0EMmMC8
pfffhahaha
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Alright then, if you're so knowledgable, why don't you come off the fence and tell us what you think?
He did. He has. This entire thread. Every single posting has made it abundantly clear what he thinks by either its support or its vehement opposition to opposing viewpoints. Would you care to make a comment that is not incredibly, painfully, please-god-tell-me-this-is-a-joke-or-I'm-going-to-blow-my-brains-out-across-my-monitor ignorant now? Or at least read the the thread?
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Alright then, if you're so knowledgable, why don't you come off the fence and tell us what you think?
What do you mean, "what I think". I said it right here:
Now, while I personally would have liked her to go more in depth in specific games, or on the topic in general, these videos are still very nice primer material to get one started on these topics.
I agree with everything said in Sarkeesians' piece. I think that examining the issues surrounding women in games and gaming is necessary, and that these examinations need to be distributed as far as possible.
I wanted to use it to point out that it is less few and far between than people think. Especially with him picking out older games rather than the newer ones of today where strong females are more common.
You're missing the point. The point Sarkeesian makes is that the vast majority of roles given to female characters in gaming is not the role of protagonist. The existence of counterexamples does not invalidate this. That writers use variations on the "Damsel in distress" trope in games as a lazy shorthand to give the male protagonist a motivation.
What this idiot is arguing against, and what the many idiots out there hating on this do not understand is that at no point was it claimed that all games are guilty of casual or inadvertent misogynism, or that the use of the damsel in distress trope is automatically bad. It can be used as a valid and well-executed character hook in order to motivate a protagonist (See, for example, Red Dead Redemption), but the writers and designers have to use it intelligently and not just use it as a quick shortcut. It is the unreflected use of these storytelling standbys that's the problem, not the existence of these standbys by itself.
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To me it looked like you were just saying. "Look at this. *describes it* This is interesting. Discuss."
The line you quote seemed to me as "This is a good way to get started to get into the discussion."
Oh come on, don't say that guy is an idiot. He was trying to help her and spoke well. Even if you think he's wrong, that doesn't make him an idiot.
Me, I think this is a "problem" that will solve itself in time now that the female gamer base is growing and gaming stories are forever getting more complex. The damsel in distress mechanic is already fading away, though there is now a rash of scantily clad pretty girls in gaming that I think is the bigger problem, but again, I think this will eventually wear off now that graphical capability is not advancing so fast. I like complex and strong female characters. There's nothing wrong with pretty girls, but there is when they swamp the character types like they do. I would much rather have a female character in an RPG clad in armour who looks like she could kick your ass than a girl in what amounts to a bikini. However, I'd have no problem with both in the same game, then you'd have variety. Keep your pretty girls, but give me something different, give me a girl who's like mid 30s, with scars and some heavy muscle, that would be something different. A lack of muscle is something that annoys me, all these skinny girls, why not have a scantily clad girl with some muscle on her body, then I can take her seriously when she's wading through the bad guys. I think developers are lazy with female characters. They often feel like Generic Pretty Girl #1524.
There is one game which springs to mind though, Code of Princess, which I watched someone Let's play. This game features the titular character as the main protagonist, and she has the skimpiest outfit I think I've ever seen on a female video game character short of something like bikini beach volleyball or the like. And yet I came to like her character and the direction the game went in general when I watched the LP.
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Sexism in computer games, I can think of 2 straight of the bat, Duke Nukem and GTA!
Those were both clearly satirical examples (even if DNF didn't really do it well), and as such aren't really good examples. Overlord I and II are also very sexist, but it's one of many things they parody. They were written by a woman, BTW. Rihanna Pratchett, you might have heard or her father (she inherited his sense of humor, so both games are really worth playing). Those games were never intended to be taken seriously.
Does that matter? If you play a game which objectifies, disempowers or otherwise degrades women, even in an absurd, satirical manner, isn't there the danger that it becomes comfortable to be in this situation? (not talking about any specific game here)
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Oh come on, don't say that guy is an idiot. He was trying to help her and spoke well. Even if you think he's wrong, that doesn't make him an idiot.
But he really, really is. Or at least was acting like one.
His entire argument was based on refuting points which she did not ever make and he made no attempt to actually provide advice on what she could improve despite saying he was giving "constructive criticism".
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There's nothing wrong with pretty girls, but there is when they swamp the character types like they do. I would much rather have a female character in an RPG clad in armour who looks like she could kick your ass than a girl in what amounts to a bikini.
Did you watch the first video, or the second one at that? What comes to mind from that statement was her description of Zelda in one of the Zelda games. Zelda runs around dressed as a boy and is empowered. Then she switches her clothing to a dress, and becomes dis-empowered. A main character who's a woman but has masculine qualities to empower her is not really a solution. It's still saying that being violent or masculine is the way to go if you want to achieve anything.
In the last video she begins at describing why the western ideal of masculinity is not a good thing. That's not saying men are bad, mind you, but the script we've been handed is limiting and destructive to ourselves.
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Oh come on, don't say that guy is an idiot. He was trying to help her and spoke well. Even if you think he's wrong, that doesn't make him an idiot.
Missing the point of these specific videos entirely, misunderstanding why Tropes vs Women exists, that's what makes him an idiot.
Me, I think this is a "problem" that will solve itself in time now that the female gamer base is growing and gaming stories are forever getting more complex.
One would hope so. But consider this: A majority of gamers are women, but no concerted effort is being made to make large, high-profile games that treat women as more than motivation dispensers for the ruggedly handsome male protagonist. Therefore, beatings must continue and indeed increase until morale improves.
The damsel in distress mechanic is already fading away, though there is now a rash of scantily clad pretty girls in gaming that I think is the bigger problem, but again, I think this will eventually wear off now that graphical capability is not advancing so fast.
Art design will change because tech isn't advancing so much? No. This is a wrong assumption on so many levels that words fail me to describe it.
I like complex and strong female characters. There's nothing wrong with pretty girls, but there is when they swamp the character types like they do. I would much rather have a female character in an RPG clad in armour who looks like she could kick your ass than a girl in what amounts to a bikini. However, I'd have no problem with both in the same game, then you'd have variety. Keep your pretty girls, but give me something different, give me a girl who's like mid 30s, with scars and some heavy muscle, that would be something different. A lack of muscle is something that annoys me, all these skinny girls, why not have a scantily clad girl with some muscle on her body, then I can take her seriously when she's wading through the bad guys. I think developers are lazy with female characters. They often feel like Generic Pretty Girl #1524.
This is another point that will be raised in future installments of the tropes vs women series. Not this one.
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There's nothing wrong with pretty girls, but there is when they swamp the character types like they do. I would much rather have a female character in an RPG clad in armour who looks like she could kick your ass than a girl in what amounts to a bikini.
Did you watch the first video, or the second one at that? What comes to mind from that statement was her description of Zelda in one of the Zelda games. Zelda runs around dressed as a boy and is empowered. Then she switches her clothing to a dress, and becomes dis-empowered. A main character who's a woman but has masculine qualities to empower her is not really a solution. It's still saying that being violent or masculine is the way to go if you want to achieve anything.
In the last video she begins at describing why the western ideal of masculinity is not a good thing. That's not saying men are bad, mind you, but the script we've been handed is limiting and destructive to ourselves.
I suppose I should. I'm not familiar with the Zelda games, but I'll watch the videos. I wasn't expecting to get sucked in, but it's far from the first time on here, so here I go again. At least it's a subject that does genuinely interest me. When I watched the video that I linked into for the first time, I had simply chanced on it. And I've seen too many people who are just basically morons ranting about this kind of thing before so I never watched her first video expecting more of the same. So I'll watch, and hope for something refreshing because I've never seen anything more than hate-filled ranting about subjects the people don't even understand on this before, often clearly for their own agendas.
Meanwhile, something I want to post...
(http://aponya.ru/images/f75d177e779f7f86cc2dad3186b2fcae.jpeg)
No.
(http://images.wikia.com/dynastywarriors/images/3/36/Ina-swxl.jpg)
Yes.
Guess who has the little girl voice and who has the strong voice.
Oh come on, don't say that guy is an idiot. He was trying to help her and spoke well. Even if you think he's wrong, that doesn't make him an idiot.
Missing the point of these specific videos entirely, misunderstanding why Tropes vs Women exists, that's what makes him an idiot.
Me, I think this is a "problem" that will solve itself in time now that the female gamer base is growing and gaming stories are forever getting more complex.
One would hope so. But consider this: A majority of gamers are women, but no concerted effort is being made to make large, high-profile games that treat women as more than motivation dispensers for the ruggedly handsome male protagonist. Therefore, beatings must continue and indeed increase until morale improves.
The damsel in distress mechanic is already fading away, though there is now a rash of scantily clad pretty girls in gaming that I think is the bigger problem, but again, I think this will eventually wear off now that graphical capability is not advancing so fast.
Art design will change because tech isn't advancing so much? No. This is a wrong assumption on so many levels that words fail me to describe it.
I like complex and strong female characters. There's nothing wrong with pretty girls, but there is when they swamp the character types like they do. I would much rather have a female character in an RPG clad in armour who looks like she could kick your ass than a girl in what amounts to a bikini. However, I'd have no problem with both in the same game, then you'd have variety. Keep your pretty girls, but give me something different, give me a girl who's like mid 30s, with scars and some heavy muscle, that would be something different. A lack of muscle is something that annoys me, all these skinny girls, why not have a scantily clad girl with some muscle on her body, then I can take her seriously when she's wading through the bad guys. I think developers are lazy with female characters. They often feel like Generic Pretty Girl #1524.
This is another point that will be raised in future installments of the tropes vs women series. Not this one.
Well, whatever. But I really don't like the way you dismissed him as soon as you saw him. That annoyed me more than anything, you'd passed judgement on him before he even opened his mouth. But it's not really worth getting hung up on him.
Nobody's really figured out how to capitalise on that female gamer base. Everyone is used to catering for a male gamer base. Eventually, someone will make a blockbuster that does capitalise on that female base, and cash in big, and others will see that, and then we'll go from there. There's a gap in the market. Someone will fill it eventually.
The point I was trying to make is I feel this pretty-girl thing is a bit of a fad. Everyone wants to make these pretty girls now that technology has advanced to this point. They will still be made, but not in the smothering numbers they are now. After they become nothing special. After they lose that eye-catching appeal. Maybe it's more a hope than a genuine feeling though. After all, I don't like them. But I've never seen any true support for them. It doesn't feel to me like gamers think these girls are the best and better than all the rest at all. It's not something I can defend with any hard evidence, so I guess I'm just hoping. It can be so much better.
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I suppose I should. I'm not familiar with the Zelda games, but I'll watch the videos. I wasn't expecting to get sucked in, but it's far from the first time on here, so here I go again. At least it's a subject that does genuinely interest me. When I watched the video that I linked into for the first time, I had simply chanced on it. And I've seen too many people who are just basically morons ranting about this kind of thing before so I never watched her first video expecting more of the same. So I'll watch, and hope for something refreshing because I've never seen anything more than hate-filled ranting about subjects the people don't even understand on this before, often clearly for their own agendas.
(http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Nathan-Fillion-Loss-For-Words-Reaction-Gif.gif)
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I looked at her videos on youtube back when it first hit the fan, and was very much unimpressed. In particular, she tried to decree what I was supposed to think, which is a big no-no, and she made up words for perceived issues instead of showing these issues actually mattered.
This new video, however, is excellent. The language is clear, the issues are well documented, and I am given space and time to make up my own mind as to what I think about it.
After giving it some thought, I fully agree with Ms Sarkeesian. I have but two nitpicks:
1. Violence against women is not epidemic. It is endemic, which is arguably worse in this case.
2. Her focus may ultimately be too narrow. Most of what she criticizes could be subsumed under "terrible writing". There's plenty of that even without misogyny.
In conclusion, I'd say that her kickstarter money is well used. Her videos have improved and her message is better off for it.
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I suppose I should. I'm not familiar with the Zelda games, but I'll watch the videos. I wasn't expecting to get sucked in, but it's far from the first time on here, so here I go again. At least it's a subject that does genuinely interest me. When I watched the video that I linked into for the first time, I had simply chanced on it. And I've seen too many people who are just basically morons ranting about this kind of thing before so I never watched her first video expecting more of the same. So I'll watch, and hope for something refreshing because I've never seen anything more than hate-filled ranting about subjects the people don't even understand on this before, often clearly for their own agendas.
(http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Nathan-Fillion-Loss-For-Words-Reaction-Gif.gif)
Basically guilty as charged. But I'm speaking the truth.
First one's under the belt. Gonna watch the second one now.
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I looked at her videos on youtube back when it first hit the fan, and was very much unimpressed. In particular, she tried to decree what I was supposed to think, which is a big no-no, and she made up words for perceived issues instead of showing these issues actually mattered.
This new video, however, is excellent. The language is clear, the issues are well documented, and I am given space and time to make up my own mind as to what I think about it.
After giving it some thought, I fully agree with Ms Sarkeesian. I have but two nitpicks:
1. Violence against women is not epidemic. It is endemic, which is arguably worse in this case.
2. Her focus may ultimately be too narrow. Most of what she criticizes could be subsumed under "terrible writing". There's plenty of that even without misogyny.
In conclusion, I'd say that her kickstarter money is well used. Her videos have improved and her message is better off for it.
Now that's interesting. I got dead on the same impression after viewing the first video. Yet you like the second. Let's see if I do too...
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2. Her focus may ultimately be too narrow. Most of what she criticizes could be subsumed under "terrible writing". There's plenty of that even without misogyny.
Yes, certainly, but keeping a narrow focus is necessary in order to convey the message in a focussed way. Putting these things under the heading of "Bad Writing" is, imho, not particularly useful. Bad writing can take many forms, but misogynism is a rather more serious issue.
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self-snip
Yes, certainly, but keeping a narrow focus is necessary in order to convey the message in a focussed way. Putting these things under the heading of "Bad Writing" is, imho, not particularly useful. Bad writing can take many forms, but misogynism is a rather more serious issue.
Sure. But there are two outcomes:
In an ideal world, her campaign will end misogynistic bad writing, leading to a golden age where all bad writing will disappear as fans realize they don't have to suffer through it any longer.
or
In the real world, creators of popular media will continue to use bad writing (including tropes degrading both women and men) en masse in spite of all attempts to stop them, because good writing is about the hardest thing to do. Using a throwaway plot is simply too convenient as long as the product sells.
But as I said, I agree with Ms Sakeesian. I hope her campaign raises awareness. Maybe people will stop buying games with terrible writing.
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Every video can be summed up in: We'd like to see strong female characters. Therein lies the problem. Any video that lasts more than ten seconds is overfunded at this point. All the extra minutes are nothing more than blunt ways to feed directorial ego.
If miss Sarkeesian actually took the time and effort to create an unbiased, informative and complete documentary that showcased both the positive and negative tropes in video games and their impact on society's treatment of women, I believe her work would have much more mass appeal.
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Every video can be summed up in: We'd like to see strong female characters. Therein lies the problem. Any video that lasts more than ten seconds is overfunded at this point.
No they can't, and thus no it doesn't, and no they aren't. There aren't any (many, at least) mustache-twirling maestros of misogyny gouting out bikini lasses, or many oblivious wide-eyed ingenues happily writing their stories of damsels and heroes unaware that We Want Strong Female Characters. The problem is not one that can be solved by making people realize that 'we want this'. People don't know how to do it, they don't know why they should do it; they don't have a plan to execute the objective 'be better at writing women' without ****ing up.
I just spent the weekend at an SF/F writers' retreat where I was the only guy and even as someone who's spent years and years working on my ability to write women and write them well, I still find myself ****ing these things up. One sentence is not enough.
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Well I strongly disagree with her. She's twisting everything when it doesn't need to be twisted. So what if it's used in some games just as a vehicle to get the hero moving, or get the player motivated. It's a game first and foremost, not a movie. If the gameplay is good, I'm good. First and foremost for me. I don't relate to any of the things she is saying. If I find myself in a game which contains a damsel in distress, I don't think about any of this garbage I just go off and save the girl. It's a classic trope and it will stay a classic. Trying to guilt us when when we don't need to be guilted. I did find the "Euthanised damsels" to be rather unsettling though, the sheer volume of them in recent years, that's new to me. Probably because they would likely fall outside the kind of games I look at.
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Every video can be summed up in: We'd like to see strong female characters. Therein lies the problem. Any video that lasts more than ten seconds is overfunded at this point. All the extra minutes are nothing more than blunt ways to feed directorial ego.
If miss Sarkeesian actually took the time and effort to create an unbiased, informative and complete documentary that showcased both the positive and negative tropes in video games and their impact on society's treatment of women, I believe her work would have much more mass appeal.
I disagree.
The problem isn't a lack of strong females, and I don't see Ms Sakeesian arguing that way. The problem is using cardboard cut-outs instead of characters.
Say a company makes a game (or and other media). Said game is a shooter or something of that calibre (pun intended). Any elaborate plot might well get in the way, and take away agency from the player (as Sarkeesian notes, the game mechanics tend to be limited). So the developers need a simple plot, an excuse plot. Unfortunately, many of the most popular (to developers, due to cost) excuse plots tend to be misogynistic.
In addition, the developers then make it even worse by trying to give "emotional depth" to their excuse plots. Again, the contract goes to the lowest bidder, which is the lowest common denominator: Men tend to find distressed women "emotionally engaging". So women are tortured and fridged, as noted in the video.
I perceive the problem to be right in the beginning, using badly-written excuse plots. The women may well be collateral damage.
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Well I strongly disagree with her. She's twisting everything when it doesn't need to be twisted. So what if it's used in some games just as a vehicle to get the hero moving, or get the player motivated. It's a game first and foremost, not a movie. If the gameplay is good, I'm good. First and foremost for me. I don't relate to any of the things she is saying. If I find myself in a game which contains a damsel in distress, I don't think about any of this garbage I just go off and save the girl. It's a classic trope and it will stay a classic. Trying to guilt us when when we don't need to be guilted. I did find the "Euthanised damsels" to be rather unsettling though, the sheer volume of them in recent years, that's new to me. Probably because they would likely fall outside the kind of games I look at.
Lorric, thank you for being a prime example of the kind of person that is part of the hate campaign against Ms Sarkeesian and this project. Thank you for being the exact kind of person that makes closing the comment sections for these videos on youtube and sensible sites like PAR necessary.
In one paragraph, you have shown exactly why this project exists, you have demonstrated exactly what kind of ignorance regarding these issues is out there.
EDIT: What you just said was, in essence, that you are just as unreflected about the stories you play through as the people writing them. That's something that you should try to change if you want to be a part of this debate, and not just an interloper.
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The E kinda ninja'd the point I was going to make, except I was going to speak generally. Ah what the Hell, I'll do it anyways.
The fact that this thread is following its current trajectory is proof enough that we (as in, the gamer community) really need to be having these conversations.
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Well I strongly disagree with her. She's twisting everything when it doesn't need to be twisted. So what if it's used in some games just as a vehicle to get the hero moving, or get the player motivated. It's a game first and foremost, not a movie. If the gameplay is good, I'm good. First and foremost for me. I don't relate to any of the things she is saying. If I find myself in a game which contains a damsel in distress, I don't think about any of this garbage I just go off and save the girl. It's a classic trope and it will stay a classic. Trying to guilt us when when we don't need to be guilted. I did find the "Euthanised damsels" to be rather unsettling though, the sheer volume of them in recent years, that's new to me. Probably because they would likely fall outside the kind of games I look at.
Lorric, thank you for being a prime example of the kind of person that is part of the hate campaign against Ms Sarkeesian and this project. Thank you for being the exact kind of person that makes closing the comment sections for these videos on youtube and sensible sites like PAR necessary.
In one paragraph, you have shown exactly why this project exists, you have demonstrated exactly what kind of ignorance regarding these issues is out there.
EDIT: What you just said was, in essence, that you are just as unreflected about the stories you play through as the people writing them. That's something that you should try to change if you want to be a part of this debate, and not just an interloper.
I do not hate her. I just disagree with her.
You have been trying to alienate me since my first post. I will talk to you, but only if you stop. Otherwise, I will just talk to the other people in the thread and ignore you.
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First off, out of curiosity I watched Sarkeesian's Damsel in Distress Part 1 and found it surprisingly straightforward and non-inflammatory. However I think that her TED talk was slightly off base. I do not think that blaming everyone for the actions of 4chan is fair, nor do I think that her experience supports her theory of misogyny on a global scale. Does the Internet mob hate women and fear the loss of male dominance in the gaming industry? Maybe. But it seems more likely that they just spotted what they thought would be an easy target for quick fun and hit it hard. Ironically she might not be the villain in their "game": she could be the "ball," i.e. Damsel in Distress. Kudos to her though for pulling herself out of it and coming out ahead.
Also good job on War in Heaven and you should so get her to play it.
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Also good job on War in Heaven and you should so get her to play it.
Yeah, but keep her away from Age of Aquarius. *cough* Elena *cough*
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do you mean eriana...
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Possibly. I really don't care much for AoA though, so forgive me for not remembering the name of the plot device correctly. [/derail]
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I do not hate her. I just disagree with her.
You have been trying to alienate me since my first post. I will talk to you, but only if you stop. Otherwise, I will just talk to the other people in the thread and ignore you.
You do not disagree with her. You do not understand her. You do not have an appreciation for these issues beyond your personal likes and dislikes (as evidenced by you going off on a tangent about character designs). You are completely unaware of the implications being put on display in these videos.
It's a game first and foremost, not a movie. If the gameplay is good, I'm good. First and foremost for me. I don't relate to any of the things she is saying. If I find myself in a game which contains a damsel in distress, I don't think about any of this garbage I just go off and save the girl.
This quote of yours is why this project exists. This quote of yours demonstrates the amount of unreflected ignorance that is present in the gaming community about the issues of feminism. If you want to know why I posted this thread, this is the reason. If you want to know why I am on your ass about this and am unwilling to let the things you post here stand without challenging them, there's your answer.
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Also good job on War in Heaven and you should so get her to play it.
Yeah, but keep her away from Age of Aquarius. *cough* Elena *cough*
I'm sure she was quite a capable woman.... If only she had been escaping on an Orion rather than an Elysium. :(
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpwBG2Dtpmk
I must thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Weeeeeeee booobies!
Hahaha oh man, this game is hilariously bad.
NSFW links hooo
Gender equality, also really uncomfortable looking 'neutral stance' (http://imageshack.us/a/img94/4364/0530201550.jpg)
"Can I at least get some clothes?"
Why are these claws so effin' huge? Why do I get weapons before clothing? (http://imageshack.us/a/img27/4483/0530201826.jpg)
I got gloves shortly after this and shoes a bit later.
Yay, I'm level 5 after 10 minute of playing. I finally get clothes. Can't wait to put these on. (http://imageshack.us/a/img818/4307/0530203822.jpg)
"How come I'm now wearing even less?!"
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I was thinking about the damsel concept, and one game which has a straight up damsel in distress that I really like, that never made it into those videos is Kessen II.
You quite literally move heaven and Earth to save her. The game also has a few strong, though feminine, female characters. I'll just drop these two videos here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhFbChdSONA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB4D7t6WGA8
Damn I wish those videos were better quality...
I do not hate her. I just disagree with her.
You have been trying to alienate me since my first post. I will talk to you, but only if you stop. Otherwise, I will just talk to the other people in the thread and ignore you.
You do not disagree with her. You do not understand her. You do not have an appreciation for these issues beyond your personal likes and dislikes (as evidenced by you going off on a tangent about character designs). You are completely unaware of the implications being put on display in these videos.
It's a game first and foremost, not a movie. If the gameplay is good, I'm good. First and foremost for me. I don't relate to any of the things she is saying. If I find myself in a game which contains a damsel in distress, I don't think about any of this garbage I just go off and save the girl.
This quote of yours is why this project exists. This quote of yours demonstrates the amount of unreflected ignorance that is present in the gaming community about the issues of feminism. If you want to know why I posted this thread, this is the reason. If you want to know why I am on your ass about this and am unwilling to let the things you post here stand without challenging them, there's your answer.
You can challenge me if you're civil with me. You haven't been.
Well, what can I say, if you say I don't understand. In that case it just comes down to us saying "You're wrong." "No, you're wrong."
I fully believe in gender equality. I treat women as equals. I don't play online, but if I did, I wouldn't start throwing around gender based insults at girls or anything, I'd just treat them as players like everyone else. And it wouldn't feel any different to lose to a male or a female.
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Hahaha oh man, this game is hilariously bad.
NSFW links hooo
Gender equality, also really uncomfortable looking 'neutral stance' (http://imageshack.us/a/img94/4364/0530201550.jpg)
"Can I at least get some clothes?"
Why are these claws so effin' huge? Why do I get weapons before clothing? (http://imageshack.us/a/img27/4483/0530201826.jpg)
I got gloves shortly after this and shoes a bit later.
Yay, I'm level 5 after 10 minute of playing. I finally get clothes. Can't wait to put these on. (http://imageshack.us/a/img818/4307/0530203822.jpg)
"How come I'm now wearing even less?!"
Ah, Spoon. Now you're a fun one for this thread, aren't you. You have a mod, and it's loaded with female characters, and they're strong for the most part. And also unashamedly portrayed as pretty sex symbols. I wonder what she would make of your mod... :D
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I fully believe in gender equality. I treat women as equals. I don't play online, but if I did, I wouldn't start throwing around gender based insults at girls or anything, I'd just treat them as players like everyone else. And it wouldn't feel any different to lose to a male or a female.
this is a major root of the problem: people often think of 'sexism' as a discrete personal stance which can be eliminated as a social problem by making all sexists revoke those beliefs or by ostracising them into irrelevance; but that just doesn't reflect the reality of the situation
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In one paragraph, you have shown exactly why this project exists, you have demonstrated exactly what kind of ignorance regarding these issues is out there.
EDIT: What you just said was, in essence, that you are just as unreflected about the stories you play through as the people writing them. That's something that you should try to change if you want to be a part of this debate, and not just an interloper.
This is true.
Lorric, thank you for being a prime example of the kind of person that is part of the hate campaign against Ms Sarkeesian and this project. Thank you for being the exact kind of person that makes closing the comment sections for these videos on youtube and sensible sites like PAR necessary.
This is not.
Lorric, from my point of view, is the sort of person who disagrees with Ms Sarkeesian, and hence benefits from observing and taking part in the debate. He is not the person who is attacking her as a person and destroying the ability to engage in these discussions.
I see the point of this these discussions, and presumably these videos, as a way of showing people that sexism is not something that you choose, not a personality. But it is a deeply engrained trait in social behaviours and interactions. Women are frequently displayed as different to men in an inferior way without our even realising it. This video shows one way many of us don't see, ignore, or think unimportant but does in fact affect us and those of us who want to be fair on women can avoid this element that we didn't before think of as being as degrading as we thought.
Also, that link I posted and spoon's playing: It's not a mod; it's a fully fledged MMO.
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In one paragraph, you have shown exactly why this project exists, you have demonstrated exactly what kind of ignorance regarding these issues is out there.
EDIT: What you just said was, in essence, that you are just as unreflected about the stories you play through as the people writing them. That's something that you should try to change if you want to be a part of this debate, and not just an interloper.
This is true.
Lorric, thank you for being a prime example of the kind of person that is part of the hate campaign against Ms Sarkeesian and this project. Thank you for being the exact kind of person that makes closing the comment sections for these videos on youtube and sensible sites like PAR necessary.
This is not.
Lorric, from my point of view, is the sort of person who disagrees with Ms Sarkeesian, and hence benefits from observing and taking part in the debate. He is not the person who is attacking her as a person and destroying the ability to engage in these discussions.
I see the point of this these discussions, and presumably these videos, as a way of showing people that sexism is not something that you choose, not a personality. But it is a deeply engrained trait in social behaviours and interactions. Women are frequently displayed as different to men in an inferior way without our even realising it. This video shows one way many of us don't see, ignore, or think unimportant but does in fact affect us and those of us who want to be fair on women can avoid this element that we didn't before think of as being as degrading as we thought.
Also, that link I posted and spoon's playing: It's not a mod; it's a fully fledged MMO.
Thanks. That was nice of you.
I don't agree with EDIT part though. We'll leave the ignorance part up in the air, as that just comes down to yes you are / no I'm not stuff. But I do enjoy and can get deeply into a good in-game story and think about it long after play has stopped. It can really enhance a game. But I'll always take gameplay over story. I said in a different thread that I'd play a game with a terrible story and great gameplay, but not a great story and terrible gameplay. So I'm quite happy to play a game if it has great gameplay, even if all the story is is a vehicle to facilitate the gameplay.
If The E wants to teach anyone anything, he's not going to do it by alienating and dismissing people. Then it will just come down to a fist pumping and high-fiving session with all the people who agree with him which will accomplish nothing.
Oh, I was referring to Spoon's Wings Of Dawn mod actually if there was some confusion. I wonder if what I said describes the links, I didn't even click them. But now I see if it's an MMO and you can play as someone like that, that maybe it does. Amusing coincidence! :)
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Also, that link I posted and spoon's playing: It's not a mod; it's a fully fledged MMO.
He was talking about Wings of Dawn (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=199.0), which is quite fun, you should play it.
EDIT: I should really read all replies next time so I don't get pre-emptively ninja'd
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Also, that link I posted and spoon's playing: It's not a mod; it's a fully fledged MMO.
He was talking about Wings of Dawn (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=199.0), which is quite fun, you should play it.
EDIT: I should really read all replies next time so I don't get pre-emptively ninja'd
Well the link could be helpful. :)
In fact, everyone should click that link and grab it and play it! It's my favourite mod around here! :D
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Oh yeah, right.
It was a bit difficult for me when I was playing it, but you're right, I should finish it.
Is Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite a damsel in distress as Ms Sarkeesian describes?
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Oh yeah, right.
It was a bit difficult for me when I was playing it, but you're right, I should finish it.
Is Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite a damsel in distress as Ms Sarkeesian describes?
I know The E likes her very much. He started a thread:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84188.0
Interesting topic title. :)
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I'll drop this (https://www.youtube.com/tv?vq=medium#/watch?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport) here and leave.
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I'll drop this (https://www.youtube.com/tv?vq=medium#/watch?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport) here and leave.
That link is faulty.
I fixed it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport
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^404 not found
e: nvm
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^404 not found
Mine or his? Mine works, I checked it.
EDIT: :)
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I'll drop this (https://www.youtube.com/tv?vq=medium#/watch?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport) here and leave.
e for tone: c'mon son don't post and run
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I'll drop this (https://www.youtube.com/tv?vq=medium#/watch?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport) here and leave.
e for tone: c'mon son don't post and run
Perhaps he is afraid that if he sticks his neck out, someone will tie a rope around it.
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Does that matter? If you play a game which objectifies, disempowers or otherwise degrades women, even in an absurd, satirical manner, isn't there the danger that it becomes comfortable to be in this situation? (not talking about any specific game here)
If you know how to "read" satire (and if the satire is done well), such games will call your attention to the issue rather than desensitize you to it. That's the difference between comedy and satire. Both get you laughing, but a comedy makes you laugh at a weak woman, and satire makes you laugh at stereotypes depicting her like that. This might not be the best explanation, but it's what I can think of at 3:26 o'clock.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport
I like that very much. Thank you An4ximandros.
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Female characters are generally horribly portrayed in both science fiction and games, a phenomenon that is not unrelated (double negative ftw).
They typically suffer from one of either two problems:
1. They are portrayed as a damsel in need of rescuing (there are variations on this theme; there are strong damsels too but the underlining characteristic is that they are always in need of rescuing from a male character, often the protagonist).
2. They are Men With Boobs (e.g. the writer seeks to write a strong, non-damsel female and ends up writing what he - it is almost always a he - sees as a strong woman, which typically embodies all the characteristics of a man except the character is said to be female - and usually an attractive one at that). The female version of Shepard in Mass Effect is a great example of this silliness.
There are a few male fantasy/sci-fi writers that have come close to accomplishing the creation of a believable strong female - Daenerys from A Song of Ice and Fire is a decent example, though still somewhat flawed - but in general the gaming industry and the science fiction realm is incredibly bad at writing women. Until they get better, mainstream women audiences generally aren't going to take either medium very seriously, either.
Anyway, I think the original author of these talks is right on her money. The gaming industry needs to develop some serious maturity around its characters, especially female characters, if it wants to develop the kind of widespread audience among women that it already has among men. It would also help if some triple-A developers and publishers quit pandering to the barely-post-pubsecent-shallow-male population with their major titles. Though that is getting better - games have really matured from what they used to be.
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Games do even worse at the Bechdel-Wallace test in aggregate than movies do.
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And really I think this is an artifact of the way (predominantly male) creators think about characters. The unmarked state, the prototypic clay from which characters issue forth, is a white straight male. Characters get traits slapped on to this base form to create a diverse cast, but the relationships are still generally protagonist-centric and prototype-centric. Even when there's a strong character who is a woman, she's probably going to have relationships mostly with male characters because she's the Other, the object, and it feels intuitively more probable for her to be connected to the subjective norm than to another Other. Even icons like Alyx Vance or Elizabeth from BSI fall into this trap.
It's like writers approach cast design the way they'd approach a D&D party - we need one of each class, where the classes are 'normal', 'woman', 'black', and, odds are, 'different normal'. Other configurations feel somehow improbable, and people even accuse them of 'Political Correctness' (whatever this means).
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The video in the original post, there was a section where it was zooming out from the crowd clapping, and there was only one guy there
He was looking around with a sort of "Can't not clap" look to him
I thought it was funny.
Moving on:
After watching the TED video again (watched it a while ago) I noticed some key things worth noting. While her original campaign was more against the subject matter of the games, it seems to have evolved into the community itself. "Gaming culture" was what stood out the most in the presentation as to me, that encompasses everything gaming (such as the communities involved)
Looking at my game collection though, 10 out of the 60 (PS3) have the option of being a female protagonist. Zero of which am I forced to be female.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=HJihi5rB_Ek&mode=transport
I thought this was excellent and much more agreeable than the way Sarkeesian presents her views.
and people even accuse them of 'Political Correctness' (whatever this means).
For someone I consider to be a smart person I keep being suprised how you have repeately expressed how you don't understand what political correctness means.
I don't think I have to explain it to you because I'm pretty sure you do know what it actually means. You just hate the word :p
It would also help if some triple-A developers and publishers quit pandering to the barely-post-pubsecent-shallow-male population with their major titles.
Yeah no. That's never gonna happen and you know it.
They pander to them because that's what they get their money from. These's so called 'AAA' games aren't made to provide social commentary, they are giant cash cows that need to be milked over and over again.
But hey, on the plus side. At least in the new call of dooty, Dogs will be better represented than ever!
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Anyway, I think the original author of these talks is right on her money. The gaming industry needs to develop some serious maturity around its characters, especially female characters, if it wants to develop the kind of widespread audience among women that it already has among men.
Question is, do they need/want to do this? There are a lot of very successful, very profitable gender specific marketing models - particularly to men (beer and professional sports being two really obvious ones) but also to women (the website Pinterest springs to mind, as does 80% of the fashion industry). Has anyone presented a market case for game developers to change their products? Is it worth pursuing the female demographic if doing so risks alienating their core consumer base?
Certainly you can make a moral or societal case for it, but that's not going to do anything to a game developer's bottom line.
[EDIT]Ninjaed by Spoon. :hopping:
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So what are good examples of females written in sci-fi/video games? I always thought halo did a good job about gender equality, but it more just ignored gender all together. Does that count as making them "men with boobs"?
In sci-Fi, I enjoyed reading Tanya Huff's Confederation of Valor which has a female protagonist. But I strongly suspect falls into "men with boobs". She also fits the determinator trope.
I've seen some dislike for Jim Butcher here, but one of his short stories in the Dresden Universe (The short story is Aftermath) takes place from a female perspective. The perspective was radically different from any that I have read to this day, and stands out in my mind as well written female character that avoids most troops in the genre.
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Yeah no. That's never gonna happen and you know it.
They pander to them because that's what they get their money from. These's so called 'AAA' games aren't made to provide social commentary, they are giant cash cows that need to be milked over and over again.
But hey, on the plus side. At least in the new call of dooty, Dogs will be better represented than ever!
But isn't that the point of this discussion (from a feminist view)? By educating people on sexist habits the hope is to persuade the sympathetic population within gamers to see some devices, or tropes, as unacceptable or ill-used and not purchase games using them badly. It's similar with modern military shooters, the hope is that when those purchasing these titles realise that the titles are repetitive, boring and stagnant they stop buying them, and cause that far too specific genre to collapse and decrease to a more reasonable size in favour of more varied titles. The difference is that anti-MMS sentiments have spread to a large proportion of gamers and promises to continue, while feminism in games is very much in its infancy and may stay that way. The similarity is that they are both a long way from coming to fruition.
Edit: Quote for context
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I'm a little too socially awkward to make the realisation myself (whats a gurl?), but a friend of mine said she sees males and females as different versions of the same thing. We are all the same species and males and females are in many ways far more similar than society (whatever that word means) represents them. So what does "man with boobs" mean? People are people, most (not all obviously) of what we define as "masculine" or "feminine" is a social construct. So what if a woman is physically strong, shoots alien invaders for exercise and eats steak for breakfast. That's her personality, her character, not someone who obviously is just a man with breasts.
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The God Emperor of Alpha Centauri disagrees. According to him (or what I get from his posts) Women = X, Men = Y. And they need to be written in a way that makes them fall into/conform to this reality. This is a view point I disagree with, to me people have far too man shades to them to use any sort of classification. Sex is simply one "trait" so to speak, as are ethnicity and nationality. The whole "Breastman" point of view is closed minded. There are men that enjoy doing things associated with females (taking care of children, for example.), as well as women that just want to enjoy a good beer and a good Soccer match after a day of hard work. Hell, I dislike alcohol and refuse to drink wine in any way because I find it disgusting (tastes bad to me), something judged to be "unmanly" by many people.
I'd like to continue this post, but I have an exam in seven hours and I have not slept all day. I think we can actually have a good discussion about this.
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Well, wine's awful, anyways. Beer is the superior alcoholic beverage. :p
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The God Emperor of Alpha Centauri disagrees. According to him (or what I get from his posts) Women = X, Men = Y. And they need to be written in a way that makes them fall into/conform to this reality. This is a view point I disagree with, to me people have far too man shades to them to use any sort of classification. Sex is simply one "trait" so to speak, as are ethnicity and nationality. The whole "Breastman" point of view is closed minded. There are men that enjoy doing things associated with females (taking care of children, for example.), as well as women that just want to enjoy a good beer and a good Soccer match after a day of hard work. Hell, I dislike alcohol and refuse to drink wine in any way because I find it disgusting (tastes bad to me), something judged to be "unmanly" by many people.
I am baffled. Where did you get this? It seems like you're mixing up my posts with someone else's (the Breastman thing) - maybe MP-Ryan? Or are you trying to ascribe a really stupid attitude to me because you believe it will accomplish...a...thing?
You literally wrote an entire post without once mentioning an opinion I have voiced in this thread and then labeled it 'Battuta'. I cannot fathom the process you went through. Unless you are from a parallel universe, in which case we are going to win a Nobel Prize.
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Be on the lookout for a poster who looks exactly like me except he has a goatee. May have kidnapped Anaximandros; to be considered armed and extremely handsome
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The God Emperor of Alpha Centauri disagrees. According to him (or what I get from his posts) Women = X, Men = Y. And they need to be written in a way that makes them fall into/conform to this reality. This is a view point I disagree with, to me people have far too man shades to them to use any sort of classification. Sex is simply one "trait" so to speak, as are ethnicity and nationality. The whole "Breastman" point of view is closed minded. There are men that enjoy doing things associated with females (taking care of children, for example.), as well as women that just want to enjoy a good beer and a good Soccer match after a day of hard work. Hell, I dislike alcohol and refuse to drink wine in any way because I find it disgusting (tastes bad to me), something judged to be "unmanly" by many people.
I'd like to continue this post, but I have an exam in seven hours and I have not slept all day. I think we can actually have a good discussion about this.
Yes, I agree. And I must also sleep now.
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Female characters are generally horribly portrayed in both science fiction and games, a phenomenon that is not unrelated (double negative ftw).
They typically suffer from one of either two problems:
1. They are portrayed as a damsel in need of rescuing (there are variations on this theme; there are strong damsels too but the underlining characteristic is that they are always in need of rescuing from a male character, often the protagonist).
2. They are Men With Boobs (e.g. the writer seeks to write a strong, non-damsel female and ends up writing what he - it is almost always a he - sees as a strong woman, which typically embodies all the characteristics of a man except the character is said to be female - and usually an attractive one at that). The female version of Shepard in Mass Effect is a great example of this silliness.
There are a few male fantasy/sci-fi writers that have come close to accomplishing the creation of a believable strong female - Daenerys from A Song of Ice and Fire is a decent example, though still somewhat flawed - but in general the gaming industry and the science fiction realm is incredibly bad at writing women. Until they get better, mainstream women audiences generally aren't going to take either medium very seriously, either.
Anyway, I think the original author of these talks is right on her money. The gaming industry needs to develop some serious maturity around its characters, especially female characters, if it wants to develop the kind of widespread audience among women that it already has among men. It would also help if some triple-A developers and publishers quit pandering to the barely-post-pubsecent-shallow-male population with their major titles. Though that is getting better - games have really matured from what they used to be.
Here's the mystery post, it was MP-Ryan.
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I think the point that MP-Ryan was getting at there is that in video games and science fiction, the characterisations of "Damsel in Distress" and "Breastman" are used far too much, rather than either of those being bad characterisations in themselves. Forgive me if I'm wrong, though.
What Killer Whale said is relevant here: it's not that those nitty-gritty FPSs are bad, per se, but that there's simply too many of them available right now.
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Yes. They are often - almost always - lazy and thoughtless, and perhaps most interestingly, one often emerges from an attempt to fix the other. 'Oh', the naive writer says, attempting to avoid writing a damsel in distress. 'I'll make this female character interesting by inverting everything. She'll be tough and swear a lot and drink and have sex!' But she still won't have much agency, or much Bechdel-fu, or much subjectivity, and so the problems haven't actually been addressed.
People write women in narrow pigeonholed ways that often position them as narrative objects. Nearly any non-protagonist woman in a movie you've seen recently probably fell into one of those pigeonholes, including many of the ones the writers want to bill as 'strong'.
Writing successful characters requires writers to accept that the performance of gender is fluid and varies a lot between individuals, that diversity within genders is much larger than between genders. It also requires a profound and often uncomfortable examination of the gender baggage the writer carriers. Most people who set out to write a 'gender blind' story, one in which a character's gender is entirely incidental to their personality and role, will fail. They don't understand the full complexity of gender and thus they don't understand how to control its deployment in the story.
For recent examples with high visibility I guess I'd point to the movies Oblivion and Ratatouille. They say little to nothing about gender yet turn out to be spectacularly gendered in the way they treat their characters.
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Mh. I'm wondering how the new Tomb Raider with it's heavy inspiration from "the Descent" would fit into this discussion.
As I've seen the movie (Descent, not the Tomb Raider movies lol) been called both mysoginistic exploitation and woman empowerement by different people I am wondering ;)
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Also, that link I posted and spoon's playing: It's not a mod; it's a fully fledged MMO.
For the record I stopped playing (and uninstalled) the game after reaching level 5. The game is all sorts of bad.
I could go indepth about why and how but that's kind of offtopic and for the most part the youtube link earlier already showed most of the flaws.
Interesting little fact, the game is released under the name Queen's blade online in korea&japan. For those familiar with that name it will explain a lot. :p
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A little more general commentary on the subject since the original point has apparently missed a few people around here.
The trouble with the Damsel and ManBoobs characterizations of women in games is that - while there are exceptions - they are the predominant ways female characters are presented. I often wonder if the male writers have ever met a woman. Both my wife and a close friend of mine from work are people I would classify as "strong women," but in completely different ways - and both of them have completely different personality types from pretty much every man I know.
Male characterization does the cookie-cutter thing as well, but to a lesser extent, and there are far more examples of unique male characterizations in games than there are female. The trouble with character writing in general is that characters often have breadth - large, significant backstory, range of emotions - but no depth - underlying motivations, personality type, response patterns. This is especially true of nearly every prominent female character in games - they are defined by the situation they are in and the other characters that surround them, versus any innate qualities. And when there are some innate qualities thrown into the mix (Mass Effect), they are derived from stereotypically male qualities or story pieces (again, think in Mass Effect that choosing female does not affect the story in any meaningful way).
I cannot think of a single game I have played with female characters in which a female was believably portrayed.
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(again, think in Mass Effect that choosing female does not affect the story in any meaningful way)
Alternatively, choosing male does not affect the story in any meaningful way (everybody I know IRL plays the series with a female Shepard).
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Question: What's a believably portrayed woman set in "X" where "X" is the genre of the game Ryan?
Examples of what you think would be nice
(again, think in Mass Effect that choosing female does not affect the story in any meaningful way)
Mass Effect is a terrible example as the character in game is given options that the player chooses to say. The character is essentially a projection of the player's personality, or what they choose the personality to be
Same goes for Fallout and Elder Scrolls games
they are defined by the situation they are in and the other characters that surround them
I've found that to be true of male characters as well...
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(again, think in Mass Effect that choosing female does not affect the story in any meaningful way)
Mass Effect is a terrible example as the character in game is given options that the player chooses to say. The character is essentially a projection of the player's personality, or what they choose the personality to be
Same goes for Fallout and Elder Scrolls games
not really. the player has as much input to character development in those games as a reader does in any choose-your-own-adventure book.
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Question: What's a believably portrayed woman set in "X" where "X" is the genre of the game Ryan?
Examples of what you think would be nice
I just said I cannot think of any games I've played with believable female characters of depth (*note I have not yet played BioShock Infinite).[/quote]
Mass Effect is a terrible example as the character in game is given options that the player chooses to say. The character is essentially a projection of the player's personality, or what they choose the personality to be
Same goes for Fallout and Elder Scrolls games
Which is fine, except Mass Effect and TES games start with a male archetype, even for female characters. It's not jarring for men to play, because we're used to the male archetype. Get a female friend of yours to play, though, and see if she is satisfied with those characters as believable females. Your dialogue options are constrained, remember.
I've found that to be true of male characters as well...
Indeed - but all games base their female characters on a man's version of that female character. Female characters are almost never written by women, and it shows.
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not really. the player has as much input to character development in those games as a reader does in any choose-your-own-adventure book.
Not really, the story proceeds in a more linear fashion than a CYOA, much more, because it's always going to a singular ending or at least traversing the same territories while it reaches its small number of endings. CYOA's don't (they typically had about four actual endings and sometimes more from what I remember, that usually took wildly different paths), and have numerous bad end dead ends games don't.
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Which is fine, except Mass Effect and TES games start with a male archetype, even for female characters. It's not jarring for men to play, because we're used to the male archetype. Get a female friend of yours to play, though, and see if she is satisfied with those characters as believable females. Your dialogue options are constrained, remember.
Actually, I found that TES: Morrowind has a nice selection of dialogue options. I think you could play a fairly believable female character if you chose to. Other TES games either don't give the player character any characterization at all (Arena and Dagerfall, you can hardly talk about archetypes when about the only thing you can do is ask for directions or quests) or almost completely railroad him/her (Oblivion) in each quest. I don't know about Skyrim, haven't gotten to it yet. Also, Morrowind is interesting in that if features at least one awkward moment regardless of your character's gender. If you're female, then an ancient hero comes off as a transsexual, if you're male, one character comes off as bisexual. Also, in neither case it's jarring, let's say that this kind of thing could be expected form both of them. Also, Shivering Isles (Oblivion's expansion) seems to assume you're female in some minor dialogue, though this might as well be a bug.
Agreed about ME, since it does give Shepard much more characterization, though I can't say I haven't met women who would act like that.
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Which is fine, except Mass Effect and TES games start with a male archetype, even for female characters. It's not jarring for men to play, because we're used to the male archetype. Get a female friend of yours to play, though, and see if she is satisfied with those characters as believable females. Your dialogue options are constrained, remember.
Actually, I found that TES: Morrowind has a nice selection of dialogue options. I think you could play a fairly believable female character if you chose to. Other TES games either don't give the player character any characterization at all (Arena and Dagerfall, you can hardly talk about archetypes when about the only thing you can do is ask for directions or quests) or almost completely railroad him/her (Oblivion) in each quest. I don't know about Skyrim, haven't gotten to it yet. Also, Morrowind is interesting in that if features at least one awkward moment regardless of your character's gender. If you're female, then an ancient hero comes off as a transsexual, if you're male, one character comes off as bisexual. Also, in neither case it's jarring, let's say that this kind of thing could be expected form both of them. Also, Shivering Isles (Oblivion's expansion) seems to assume you're female in some minor dialogue, though this might as well be a bug.
Agreed about ME, since it does give Shepard much more characterization, though I can't say I haven't met women who would act like that.
I don't think the nice/jerk dichotomy constitutes believable difference in gender behaviors, which is generally the extent of dialogue options you have in these games. Granted, it's been a while since I've bothered with any of these games so my memory may be off and/or my views may not represent the modern industry (though reading this thread I wouldn't count on it).
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morrowind... barely had characters at all, let alone male and female ones. also don't forget, vivec's a hermaphrodite!
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To me, the eye opener for sexism in games / players is possibly the last part of the original metroid.
You watch the character take her suit off and you are surprised to find she's female. The creators made it on purpose so you'd be surprised, and you actually are surprised and now you'll probably feel bad about it because of the implicit assumption that the strong character had to be a male one.
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I'd say Morrigan from the first Dragon Age came off as a believable female. She had an agenda of her own rather than simply wanting to do whatever the player wanted to do. She didn't fall into any of the tropes mentioned, she was never the damsel in distress or guy with boobs.
Of course the game designers ruined it by sticking her in a costume with her boobs hanging out, but seeing as the first thing you'll probably do is upgrade her to a better set of wizards robes, even that isn't an issue for long.
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How about Alyx Vance.
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Alyx is sort of interesting but would be a lot better if she weren't written as a prop for the player's ego.
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Or if Gordon Freeman was an actual character. Rendering the player character a mute means you lose a fair bit of interaction NPC's could have with the player. Sure, not all of it; but you still lose a fair bit.
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I don't think the nice/jerk dichotomy constitutes believable difference in gender behaviors, which is generally the extent of dialogue options you have in these games. Granted, it's been a while since I've bothered with any of these games so my memory may be off and/or my views may not represent the modern industry (though reading this thread I wouldn't count on it).
Given that the male and female characters in something like Mass Effect emerge from identical backgrounds and progress through identical stories, I'd find it even less believable if they behaved radically different.
A truly sustainable case for this issue is probably best built around the in-game romances and how they're written as they mark the major separation of gender within the context of the game's world. (It will still be uncomplimentary I expect but I haven't exactly sat down and played in awhile either, so.)
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I just said I cannot think of any games I've played with believable female characters of depth
...Uh... I know...
That's why I'm asking you to elaborate on what you believe to be something that is believable (to you)
I don't want to presume to know what you think is all
Get a female friend of yours to play, though, and see if she is satisfied with those characters as believable females
Funny you say that, but a female friend of mine adores this game
Several actually
Haven't asked about believable females though, but what's believable in a world that isn't ours? Yeah there's a lot of games that take place within our Universe (that is to say Earth) but as with things changing as they do culture wise, who is to say what is and what isn't believable at that time?
But that's just arguing semantics
Carry on
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Games with good female characters, well....
Dragon Age 2 and Red Dead Redemption would top the list for me. I would love to include Mirror's Edge in this as well, but Faith's and her sister's characters are rather ill-defined as it is.
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I don't think the nice/jerk dichotomy constitutes believable difference in gender behaviors, which is generally the extent of dialogue options you have in these games. Granted, it's been a while since I've bothered with any of these games so my memory may be off and/or my views may not represent the modern industry (though reading this thread I wouldn't count on it).
Given that the male and female characters in something like Mass Effect emerge from identical backgrounds and progress through identical stories, I'd find it even less believable if they behaved radically different.
So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?
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Games with good female characters, well....
Hecuba from Nox was pretty freaking amazing....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qP5ici6B5g (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qP5ici6B5g)
Edit I was cheering when she killed Horrendus even though I had played as a warrior first time (Note to anyone who plays this game the warrior path sucks)
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So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?
I should really just call you a dumb troll and move on, because I never actually espoused the second half of that anywhere in the thread, or perhaps play this for comedy like Battman did with a similar situation. Or I could mock you for not understanding that I'm very deliberately making a referent to only one Mass Effect character and possibly anyone who comes from a similar background.
But I'll do you the courtesy of a serious reply.
N7 is painted on Shepard's armor. It is an open statement of a lifetime spent in military service of a very intensive, very invasive variety. That N7 will result in a uniformity of thought and behavior well beyond the norm, one that will flatten the range of possible responses hugely. Writing Shepard very differently based on gender would probably be a mistake.
(As for the other characters the only one I thought it really openly mattered they were female was Samara's post-killing-Morinith period, but that's not the same thing as the others being well or badly written; I 'd have to play the games again to offer an opinion on the other characters.)
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Games with good female characters, well....
Hecuba from Nox was pretty freaking amazing....
Play the Wizard's path and say that again...
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So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?
I should really just call you a dumb troll and move on, because I never actually espoused the second half of that anywhere in the thread, or perhaps play this for comedy like Battman did with a similar situation. Or I could mock you for not understanding that I'm very deliberately making a referent to only one Mass Effect character and possibly anyone who comes from a similar background.
But I'll do you the courtesy of a serious reply.
You needn't have bothered, if you feel the need to be this smugly disingenuous.
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The endings in Nox were all a bit ambiguous. For the wizard path she lost her memories and seamed to have lost her powers but that doesn't mean anything with regards to sexism. In the game itself she was portrayed as an unmatched supervillan concentrating more on the fact that she was a evil necromancer rather than a female. Although her tendency to slaughter male dominated societies (warriors/wizards) did seam to me to be making a bit of a feminist statement
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You needn't have bothered, if you feel the need to be this smugly disingenuous.
I thought you'd appreciate that sort of thing. It's basically your schtick.
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????? I make one post commenting on an apparent inconsistency in your evaluation of the portrayal of female characters in games (which I think is probably right, on the whole) and suddenly you have this burning personal hatred of me?
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Since neither of you can remain polite, you're both getting all your posts moderated for the next couple of days.
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Wait a minute please, Mr. Hammer. I don't see anything wrong on the part of PhantomHoover in these posts, unless there's something from another thread. He seems perfectly reasonable to me, especially under the circumstances.
Don't hit me please, Mr. Hammer! :)
morrowind... barely had characters at all, let alone male and female ones. also don't forget, vivec's a hermaphrodite!
I don't think the nice/jerk dichotomy constitutes believable difference in gender behaviors, which is generally the extent of dialogue options you have in these games. Granted, it's been a while since I've bothered with any of these games so my memory may be off and/or my views may not represent the modern industry (though reading this thread I wouldn't count on it).
Given that the male and female characters in something like Mass Effect emerge from identical backgrounds and progress through identical stories, I'd find it even less believable if they behaved radically different.
So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?
So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?
I should really just call you a dumb troll and move on, because I never actually espoused the second half of that anywhere in the thread, or perhaps play this for comedy like Battman did with a similar situation. Or I could mock you for not understanding that I'm very deliberately making a referent to only one Mass Effect character and possibly anyone who comes from a similar background.
But I'll do you the courtesy of a serious reply.
You needn't have bothered, if you feel the need to be this smugly disingenuous.
????? I make one post commenting on an apparent inconsistency in your evaluation of the portrayal of female characters in games (which I think is probably right, on the whole) and suddenly you have this burning personal hatred of me?
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The endings in Nox were all a bit ambiguous. For the wizard path she lost her memories and seamed to have lost her powers but that doesn't mean anything with regards to sexism. In the game itself she was portrayed as an unmatched supervillan concentrating more on the fact that she was a evil necromancer rather than a female. Although her tendency to slaughter male dominated societies (warriors/wizards) did seam to me to be making a bit of a feminist statement
Hilarious as the sentiment may seem, 'kill all men' is not really a feminist statement
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and suddenly you have this burning personal hatred of me?
...no.
Rather you typically don't do anyone the courtesy of addressing their statements at length or acknowledging any kind of nuance or qualifier, and seem to be trying to maximize the amount of **** you can stir. (If you'd actually laid out your position rather than nitpicked a single possible inconsistency I'd have responded in a much more affable manner.) So I decided to be equally annoying just this once, albeit in a different manner.
This appears to have resulted in something of an overreaction to both our posts.
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'kill all men' is not really a feminist statement
:)
No more one evil necromancer (who just happens to be a woman) can overcome the mightiest wizards and warlocks (who are all old men blinded by their mutual distrust and rivalries) with relative ease. The actress who voiced Hecuba was awesome as she managed to convey the sadistic joy that Hecuba felt in destroying these old fools. The arch-enemy role could just as easily have been done by a man but I think that Hecuba was a far more effective enemy in this game. In doing so she overturned the old "weak woman" sterotype by showing how easily she could best the greatest male heros in Nox. (Made all the easier with the inclusion of no other strong female roles in the game)
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Hilarious as the sentiment may seem, 'kill all men' is not really a feminist statement
Wow. The more you know!
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Feminism is a very complicated issue. I don't think it can be taken just in terms of games.
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I don't see anything wrong on the part of PhantomHoover in these posts
I do
NGTM wasn't the one who said he finds females in games are not believable as accused in this post:
So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?
Rather it was MP Ryan seen here:
I cannot think of a single game I have played with female characters in which a female was believably portrayed.
NGTM was simply stating that to be written otherwise due to gender, would be unbelievable as the male and female characters in Mass Effect are essentially the same person
His point was directed solely towards ME, not any other game
Phantom's post was that of bridging a general statement to a specific statement from two different people, and making them one thought.
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Let's not talk about who did what, and instead return to the subject.
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I vote we spend more money on biotech and advanced surgical methods so people can quickly and easily be whatever sex they choose to be, hopefully invalidating all these nasty sex and gender related issues because they simply won't matter anymore due to the ease with which people can go change those two attributes.
There, transhuman wank over. :P
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Then we kidnap all of the Westbrough Baptist church members and swap their sexes so that they're all gay. :p
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Then we kidnap all of the Westbrough Baptist church members and swap their sexes so that they're all gay. :p
This brings up the tough question (related to Sparda's comment) of whether fluid sex necessarily permits fluid gender.
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Well, there's really only one way to test the hypothesis of fluid sex leading to fluid gender, and that's to have fluid sex.
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We have that, and it isn't an easy territory to explore - the relationship between sex, gender, and sexual orientation is a couple links more intricate than most people are used to considering in the West.
There are a number of societies with really different takes on gender. Samona fa'afafine are a cool case study.
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There are a number of societies with really different takes on gender. Samona fa'afafine are a cool case study.
Going by the Wiki link (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine) and possibly completely false first impressions ( ;) )... this sounds more like sending more people to the kitchen "where they belong" - nevermind the gender :cough:
Raising either female or male kids with a predetermined purpose / role in life ... raises all kinds of reds flag for me. Smells of casteism ...
Is that really a different take on gender? I don t see it. I just see a certain percentage of the male population having to put up with being placed in a certain predetermined life "as well".
Course... as said above, I could be completely wrong ;)
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i find it interesting that most cultural 3rd genders are feminine men, which is something which in the west is kind of implicitly recognised (cf. drag queens etc.) if not given much singular significance. given that, i'm not really sure gender is as fluid and arbitrary as some claim
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I don't know if you're completely wrong, but you're not really understanding the situation or its complexity. So you're certainly at least a bit wrong!
Your take is that men are assigned to be fa'afafine and that this is close to casteism. There are factual problems and less factual complexities to unpack here.
On the pure factual level, children are made fa'afafine if the family sees a fa'afafine in their behavior as a child. This isn't pure self-selection but it isn't entirely arbitrary either. Today, many fa'afafine actually self-select, even with resistance from their parents. Surveyed fa'afafine think positively of their childhood gender behavior whether or not parents supported it, suggesting that the primary driver of being fa'afafine may be internal, not external. If the child chooses to be fa'fafafine, how can it be a caste system? The evidence seems to suggest that fa'afafine know they are fa'afafine from very early childhood.
On the more complex political level, we face a number of questions:
-To what extent are we able to judge the moral rightness or wrongness of another society's gender systems? We hold egalitarian norms as a universal ideal, but our own societies still practice sharply gendered caste-style upbringing.
-Aren't all gender roles externally mandated? To what extent are gender systems a product of feedback between individually motivated behavior and social reinforcement of that behavior?
-You're not wrong to be worried about the idea of assigning a child to a gender role, but is it possible to avoid doing this? We already provide strong assignment to boys and girls. How are the fa'afafine different?
The fa'fafine are absolutely a different take on gender. They map to no similar concept in the West. We have no pervasive third gender; we do have gay men, a sexual orientation often accompanied by different gendered behavior, but gay men are generally involved in liaisons with other gay men, whereas fa'afafine rarely if ever liase with other fia'afafine, almost exclusively partnering with 'straight' (to appropriate the Western term) Samoan men.
You seem to have interpreted the fa'fafine as a proposed example of a 'better' system, some more socially just or equal setup. But that's not why I think they're interesting; I'm not trying to evaluate their moral rectitude or the egalitarianism of Samoan genders. The remarkable thing about the fa'afafine, and other third or liminal genders around the world, is the parallax they provide in demonstrating why our gender system isn't necessarily the normative one, and why gender is more fluid and diverse than we commonly conceive.
Although the evidence is weak, the fa'afafine and the fertility of their female relatives also provides interesting support for the sexual antagonism/'Johnny Depp' hypothesis.
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The fa'fafine are absolutely a different take on gender. They map to no similar concept in the West. We have no pervasive third gender; we do have gay men, a sexual orientation often accompanied by different gendered behavior, but gay men are generally involved in liaisons with other gay men, whereas fa'afafine rarely if ever liase with other fia'afafine, almost exclusively partnering with 'straight' (to appropriate the Western term) Samoan men.
Well we... do have transwomen. From what I've read of fa'afafine and all the many other analogous features in other cultures it seems plausible that the 'feminine man' gender is essentially a way of categorising transwomen before any means of effective sex reassignment have been developed.
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Then we kidnap all of the Westbrough Baptist church members and swap their sexes so that they're all gay. :p
This brings up the tough question (related to Sparda's comment) of whether fluid sex necessarily permits fluid gender.
There are some studies (published in Science, no less) that pretty much refute absolute correlation between sex and gender (as I believe you know).
Biological sex, physical sex, and self-identified gender can appear in pretty much any of the possible combinations within human society - further complicated by the fact that most societies assign binary gender roles but the sexual practices differ between societies (ex: the African society in which young unmarried men / post-pubescent boys engage in oral sex, despite being completely heterosexual).
Though I learned something today - I'd never heard of the fa'afafine before this thread, which is odd.
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The fa'fafine are absolutely a different take on gender. They map to no similar concept in the West. We have no pervasive third gender; we do have gay men, a sexual orientation often accompanied by different gendered behavior, but gay men are generally involved in liaisons with other gay men, whereas fa'afafine rarely if ever liase with other fia'afafine, almost exclusively partnering with 'straight' (to appropriate the Western term) Samoan men.
Well we... do have transwomen. From what I've read of fa'afafine and all the many other analogous features in other cultures it seems plausible that the 'feminine man' gender is essentially a way of categorising transwomen before any means of effective sex reassignment have been developed.
Fa'afafine are definitively not transwomen as they experience no dysphoria about their biological identity. They would not seek sex reassignment.
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So I got to this extremely late. Seen some videos of hers (independently of this thread), and quite agreed with the general gist of them.
"Huh, nicely caught, perhaps too severe here and there, somewhat going to the deep end there, but I can see her point"
I ain't exactly a fan, but I like the idea that people post their views on cultural ideologies, patterns they recognize, even if they are wrong it's good to discuss and so on and so on.
Then I saw the internet reaction to it. Holy ****ing cow. And people who I had in somewhat relative high regard going full retard on this one.
So I'll just leave this thought: We have still *lots* to go as a culture. *LOTS*.
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She manages to explain the issue without insulting our precious masculine sensibilities. And it is important that normal feminist is in the spotlight for a change, not only the man-hating ones that sadly attract the most attention. There will be hate campaign and trolls, its just a part of internet culture for any remotely controversial issue and I am sure she knows it well too.
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I've watched a few of her other videos. She occasionally hits on something but mostly it's dogma at best and poison at worst. Trying to brainwash people, tell them what to think and how to think, and clearly it's succeeding unfortunately. I bet if she opened up the like/dislike function on her videos many of them would be thumbed down into oblivion where they belong, so of course she doesn't.
Men shouldn't be taken in or guilted by it and women need to find a better role model who isn't so one dimensional in her thinking to fight in their corner. Her rhetoric is very damaging for both sexes.
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And it is important that normal feminist is in the spotlight for a change, not only the man-hating ones that sadly attract the most attention.
I'm sorry, can you provide a definition for "man-hating feminist" that isn't self-contradictory?
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... Should I move this over to General Discussion as a disinfection move for this board?
Cause it really seems like it belongs there now.
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Barring Lorric posts it hasn't been that bad, and it is about a series of videos re: gaming.
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... Should I move this over to General Discussion as a disinfection move for this board?
Cause it really seems like it belongs there now.
Thank you.
I've been saying this from the beginning, but always been told "lol no it's about gaming".
It's not what it's about, it's about how people behave in it.
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And it is important that normal feminist is in the spotlight for a change, not only the man-hating ones that sadly attract the most attention.
I'm sorry, can you provide a definition for "man-hating feminist" that isn't self-contradictory?
I probably cannot, they are walking contradictions. But you know the type. As far as I remember, last time (self-proclaimed) feminism was in mainstream media, they were trying to ban porn. My point is that this series can help to show the sane side of feminism to non-feminists, and that is important. Particularly after all the controversy, if someone actually looks at the video, then he will realize its not that bad at all.
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I don't think the "internet" will behave remotely near your wishes... just watch thunderf00t's reaction to it, for example. Or many others, whom I regarded as having an inch of brain and so on.
My own reaction to the videos is more on the order of "Damn, how I wished they wrote better women in games". The great thing about Mass Effect was how people reacted to Shepard in the *exact* same manner, be Shepard a woman or a man. Yes, I know, that's the byproduct of a limitation, but I cherish that, only because I have that nagging feeling that had Shepard been designed as a "woman" from the get-go, it would be astronomically bad. As it is, everyone else just assumes that Shepard is a bad ass, and treats the Specter as a specter, irrespectively of whether it's a man or a woman.
It was a novel experience to me, and I'm sure many people played Mass Effect as "Jane" precisely because of this.
But that's just not good enough. I wish for an actually well written *woman*, not a well written character that had the *possibility* of being a woman, etc.
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I don't think the "internet" will behave remotely near your wishes... just watch thunderf00t's reaction to it, for example. Or many others, whom I regarded as having an inch of brain and so on.
My own reaction to the videos is more on the order of "Damn, how I wished they wrote better women in games". The great thing about Mass Effect was how people reacted to Shepard in the *exact* same manner, be Shepard a woman or a man. Yes, I know, that's the byproduct of a limitation, but I cherish that, only because I have that nagging feeling that had Shepard been designed as a "woman" from the get-go, it would be astronomically bad. As it is, everyone else just assumes that Shepard is a bad ass, and treats the Specter as a specter, irrespectively of whether it's a man or a woman.
It was a novel experience to me, and I'm sure many people played Mass Effect as "Jane" precisely because of this.
But that's just not good enough. I wish for an actually well written *woman*, not a well written character that had the *possibility* of being a woman, etc.
I thought I'd get a look at that. I liked most of it. Here it is if anyone else wants to see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I
EDIT: There's a part 2. I haven't seen this one yet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_461680&feature=iv&src_vid=QJeX6F-Q63I&v=aGAvjwQPCHE
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It's not what it's about, it's about how people behave in it.
As you should probably have learned from numerous ugly derails about Sword of the Stars, this is 100% false.
But you know the type.
No, I don't. Social-commentary wise I genuinely do not. Maybe if you were talking about bad fantasy authors.
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I thought I'd get a look at that. I liked most of it.
The fundamental problem with thunderf00t's analysis is that he argues there are no "issues" here because games are made "to make a profit".
What thunderf00t misrepresents here is that he thinks it's all a big paranoia about a conspiracy theory where the giant "patriarchy" cartel tries to subjugate women, when in fact it's just capitalism trying to turn a profit (and what's wrong in that?).
But this wasn't discussed anywhere. It's a strawman. What she tries to argue is that there are tropes which are the most common in many, if not most, AAA games, without majorly discussing the reasons why. IOW, she's pointing out that there are problems here, as shown by sheer number of cases depicted. Elsewhere she makes it blatantly obvious she thinks the problem runs deep in our culture, that, IOW, it's ideology working without us being aware or conscious about it. There is no conspiracy ideation here.
Yes, there are counter examples (what a relief). But they function mostly as exceptions to the rules, not as evidence that the case is bollocks. It isn't bollocks, and seeing men mansplaining to women that there's nothing wrong in our culture from a feminist point of view, that it's all bollocks and so on is really, really sad.
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As you should probably have learned from numerous ugly derails about Sword of the Stars, this is 100% false.
What, because there has been derails before makes it ok to have derails now ? Bull****.
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Stop derailing, Matth.
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What, because there has been derails before makes it ok to have derails now ? Bull****.
You do realize I was quoting a post there? (A post you wrote!) One arguing that behavior determines if something goes to gendisc?
Are you blatantly changing out your argument here from "bad behavior means it moves" to "derails mean it moves" or are you failing to realize I provided an example of bad behavior about games doesn't mean things move?
I liked most of it.
Given that it blatantly misses the point of these videos, and we've explained the point of these several times to you and you have claimed to understand, why?
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But you know the type.
No, I don't. Social-commentary wise I genuinely do not. Maybe if you were talking about bad fantasy authors.
Yeah, I really don't "know the type" either; I was hoping you would elaborate, 666maslo666.
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People like to call feminists like Andrea Dworkin man-hating.
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I think when people talk about man-hating feminists, they are talking more about this sort of thing (http://users.livejournal.com/_allecto_/34718.html).
Yes it's proof of the fact that there is no cause so right that you won't find an idiot following it rather than proof of "What feminism is really about" like some people claim, but there are people dragging down the cause they profess to have with this kind of drivel and it's silly to deny they exist.
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I'm pretty sure that the actual significance of those types of people in feminism is very much exaggerated. They aren't common and their views aren't really accepted by anyone but themselves.
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I can't say I disagree with that. But there is a very vocal lunatic fringe to feminism who make stupid pronouncements such as "All men are rapists!", etc.
It's similar to the way that there is a very vocal lunatic fringe to Christianity. Claiming Westborough Baptist is representative of mainstream Christianity is stupid, but claiming they don't exist at all is the same kind of stupid as claiming that there is no such thing as the man-hating feminist.
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She managed to squeeze eight pages of discussion from this board alone ;)
The thing is, she's right in what she says, but then, in stories, everything is a caricature, not all scientists wear white coats and talk like Brains from Thunderbirds, not all soldiers have an IQ that seems to alternate from 'Hur-Hur he said "penetrate"' to 'I'm relabrating the Nanotech fibres now.. with my teeth!', often in the same soldier.
She's also right that it is the trope that is the problem, the 'maiden in distress' is one of the oldest, most deeply ingrained tropes out there, that'll take a lot to shift.
Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
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Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
This, I feel, is part of why so many people reacted so poorly to the videos. How do you expect people to react when you do nothing but criticize some of their favorite things? Pointing out problems is good and all, and obviously I don't think this justifies any of the abuse she received, but if she wants to do any convincing of people that wouldn't agree anyway she'll need to rethink how she approaches the issue.
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What would you do differently then? I mean, the problem here is that positive examples of the things criticized here are rather hard to come by in the first place. Giving them equal standing to the hundreds of negative examples would undermine the point that is being made on a subconscious level at least; and given that the whole premise of the series seems to be "Here are a few stereotypes that are overused, and here's why we need to be more aware of the implications being made by their use", not an attempt at devising measures to improve the situation, I think the general approach taken here is not that bad.
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it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause
First, that is not an argument for her being wrong, it's an argument for someone's feelings being hurt by it being pointed out they're doing something wrong. That's not a valid...well, anything. It's especially not valid when it comes to artistic criticism. Ebert's job was not to speculate on the causes of why a movie was terrible, but to tell you why it was terrible.
Second, the assumption that a root cause is easily identifiable or even necessary. This is something way down there in the murky netherworlds of the human psyche. You're asking for root causes on something that a listing of causes would take longer than the actual video itself and not all would be applicable to every case and is generally a mess. This is not an engineering problem where diagnosis of fault is key to correction. This is a behavioral issue. Behavior faults lie in themselves because behavior is a choice. Causes may not be useful for correcting behavior, and may not be correctable themselves.
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it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause
First, that is not an argument for her being wrong, it's an argument for someone's feelings being hurt by it being pointed out they're doing something wrong. That's not a valid...well, anything. It's especially not valid when it comes to artistic criticism. Ebert's job was not to speculate on the causes of why a movie was terrible, but to tell you why it was terrible.
Second, the assumption that a root cause is easily identifiable or even necessary. This is something way down there in the murky netherworlds of the human psyche. You're asking for root causes on something that a listing of causes would take longer than the actual video itself and not all would be applicable to every case and is generally a mess. This is not an engineering problem where diagnosis of fault is key to correction. This is a behavioral issue. Behavior faults lie in themselves because behavior is a choice. Causes may not be useful for correcting behavior, and may not be correctable themselves.
And once again, you quote a few words from a sentence and try to treat it as a whole one. Stop that, it's annoying.
Allow me to finish that for you :
Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
Basically, it's easy to point a finger at 'men' and say "You're doing it wrong!", but how many people, at the end of the day, are going to pay attention to that? As has been evidenced in here, people see 'feminist' and move on, so even though she is making valid points, people will automatically assume conflict of interest unless some attempt is made to moderate that viewpoint.
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I thought I'd get a look at that. I liked most of it.
The fundamental problem with thunderf00t's analysis is that he argues there are no "issues" here because games are made "to make a profit".
What thunderf00t misrepresents here is that he thinks it's all a big paranoia about a conspiracy theory where the giant "patriarchy" cartel tries to subjugate women, when in fact it's just capitalism trying to turn a profit (and what's wrong in that?).
But this wasn't discussed anywhere. It's a strawman. What she tries to argue is that there are tropes which are the most common in many, if not most, AAA games, without majorly discussing the reasons why. IOW, she's pointing out that there are problems here, as shown by sheer number of cases depicted. Elsewhere she makes it blatantly obvious she thinks the problem runs deep in our culture, that, IOW, it's ideology working without us being aware or conscious about it. There is no conspiracy ideation here.
Yes, there are counter examples (what a relief). But they function mostly as exceptions to the rules, not as evidence that the case is bollocks. It isn't bollocks, and seeing men mansplaining to women that there's nothing wrong in our culture from a feminist point of view, that it's all bollocks and so on is really, really sad.
His point isn't that there are no issues, it's that nobody thinks of this dogma that she's spouting when making games. Games are meant to be fun. Games are meant to please people. They do so. If they don't, they don't make money.
As the tropes go, she wants them wiped out. And that's wrong. The Damsel in distress trope is old, but it's still capable of being well used, and you're just stifling creativity if you remove it from a developer's arsenal. Every generation of gamers should be able to enjoy being the hero and saving the girl. That's why Double Dragon got it's remakes, because it's a classic. I haven't heard Double Dragion mentioned in years, but as soon as it came up I thought "Marian". I remembered the girl's name even though you barely see her.
I'll give you that the "bollocks" part was unnecessary. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion, but she's so arrogant, just telling you how you think and how the game makes you think and how you should think, and it doesn't work like that.
I think when people talk about man-hating feminists, they are talking more about this sort of thing (http://users.livejournal.com/_allecto_/34718.html).
Yes it's proof of the fact that there is no cause so right that you won't find an idiot following it rather than proof of "What feminism is really about" like some people claim, but there are people dragging down the cause they profess to have with this kind of drivel and it's silly to deny they exist.
Don't forget the type that will get offended if you hold a door open for them and the like.
She managed to squeeze eight pages of discussion from this board alone ;)
The thing is, she's right in what she says, but then, in stories, everything is a caricature, not all scientists wear white coats and talk like Brains from Thunderbirds, not all soldiers have an IQ that seems to alternate from 'Hur-Hur he said "penetrate"' to 'I'm relabrating the Nanotech fibres now.. with my teeth!', often in the same soldier.
She's also right that it is the trope that is the problem, the 'maiden in distress' is one of the oldest, most deeply ingrained tropes out there, that'll take a lot to shift.
Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
I'm not sure the trope is the problem. And even if it is, the only potential problems are overuse and laziness, problems related to the quality of gaming, not feminism.
That's exactly what she's doing, saying "This is wrong, that is wrong, this is what I believe and you must believe it as well." She's just pumping out dogma. When someone backs it up with medical science or something, then I'll start taking notice. I'm not even sure she does believe. This is something for everyone to think about, but she comes across as having no sincerity, no belief, no conviction to me.
Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
This, I feel, is part of why so many people reacted so poorly to the videos. How do you expect people to react when you do nothing but criticize some of their favorite things? Pointing out problems is good and all, and obviously I don't think this justifies any of the abuse she received, but if she wants to do any convincing of people that wouldn't agree anyway she'll need to rethink how she approaches the issue.
Exactly. She does nothing to make us want to care about the issue, and she's not preaching to the converted here, she's trying to convert. She makes no effort to take the time and try and connect with her audience, but she does inspire many negative emotions. You can feel her contempt for gamers as well. I wonder if she even played those games.
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The trope is important I think, in that we are a borrowing culture, we take things from our past and try to adapt them for the moment. The problem is that certain sections of popular media throughout history have bought forward more than the concepts, but the characters also, so stories that originated in Hunter-Gatherer nations have got warped like Chinese whispers. The more detached we got from the reality of gender roles in ancient societies, the more warped our perceptions of them became.
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The trope is important I think, in that we are a borrowing culture, we take things from our past and try to adapt them for the moment. The problem is that certain sections of popular media throughout history have bought forward more than the concepts, but the characters also, so stories that originated in Hunter-Gatherer nations have got warped like Chinese whispers. The more detached we got from the reality of gender roles in ancient societies, the more warped our perceptions of them became.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. Are you saying characters in a game set in the past need to have the values of people living in that time?
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I mean, the problem here is that positive examples of the things criticized here are rather hard to come by in the first place. Giving them equal standing to the hundreds of negative examples would undermine the point that is being made on a subconscious level at least;
Yeah, showing positive examples isn't at all what I meant when I said "she'll need to rethink how she approaches the issue", and wouldn't even help for the reasons you said. The entire format of how she's talking about the tropes I think is closer to the issue. But this brings us along to the next part of your post...
and given that the whole premise of the series seems to be "Here are a few stereotypes that are overused, and here's why we need to be more aware of the implications being made by their use", not an attempt at devising measures to improve the situation, I think the general approach taken here is not that bad.
Yep. There's nothing bad about this approach if you're just concerned with pointing out the issues with stereotypes, which is definitely important. The problem I see is when people watch these and get defensive and argue that there's nothing wrong with games for some reason or another, which I think could be lessened if she approached the issue with a bit more subtlety. Is she obligated to? Of course not, but I think it's just as important to address the population that would get defensive about this as it is to address people that just need to know about it.
*snip*
I'm going to be blunt here, Lorric. You're the exact person I'm talking about when I say "the population that would get defensive". I'm not going to try and do a point-for-point rebuttal of the things you said but no, she was not trying to convert the masses with these videos, that's the entire point I'm making. And no, that is not an excuse to continue to hold these beliefs.
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Basically, it's easy to point a finger at 'men' and say "You're doing it wrong!", but how many people, at the end of the day, are going to pay attention to that? As has been evidenced in here, people see 'feminist' and move on, so even though she is making valid points, people will automatically assume conflict of interest unless some attempt is made to moderate that viewpoint.
Feminism doesn't target men, it targets the gender system, the patriarchy - a system which hurts both men and women.
The trope is important I think, in that we are a borrowing culture, we take things from our past and try to adapt them for the moment. The problem is that certain sections of popular media throughout history have bought forward more than the concepts, but the characters also, so stories that originated in Hunter-Gatherer nations have got warped like Chinese whispers. The more detached we got from the reality of gender roles in ancient societies, the more warped our perceptions of them became.
This sounds like some kind of narrative evopsych and so I have to caution you that it's probably a terrific oversimplification.
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I'm going to be blunt here, Lorric. You're the exact person I'm talking about when I say "the population that would get defensive". I'm not going to try and do a point-for-point rebuttal of the things you said but no, she was not trying to convert the masses with these videos, that's the entire point I'm making. And no, that is not an excuse to continue to hold these beliefs.
Why is that a bad thing? You just said in your previous post how do you expect people to react.
What's the point of the videos then if she's not trying to convert people? You just said in your previous post "How do you expect people to react when you do nothing but criticize some of their favorite things? Pointing out problems is good and all, and obviously I don't think this justifies any of the abuse she received, but if she wants to do any convincing of people that wouldn't agree anyway she'll need to rethink how she approaches the issue."
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Stop that, it's annoying.
Stop assuming that just because I try to quote only the core portions of why your argument doesn't work, I'm not attempting to addressing your argument as a whole...and we've got a deal!
Basically, it's easy to point a finger at 'men'
This is a viewer assumption. Plenty of people have worked to perpetuate these stereotypes, a decent number of them were women (take the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing, most are usually considered romantic movies and if what comprises at least half of their target audience stopped seeing them they'd be a lot less viable). Everyone is getting called out here.
and say "You're doing it wrong!", but how many people, at the end of the day, are going to pay attention to that?
It's especially not valid when it comes to artistic criticism. Ebert's job was not to speculate on the causes of why a movie was terrible, but to tell you why it was terrible.
This deals with "art". Movies. Video games. It is artistic criticism. Eurogamer and RPS don't tell you, and typically don't even know, why a game turned out the way it did. All they can do is report on the finished product.
Now, I've read some criticisms that do attempt to explore why the work the in question is terrible. (I highly recommend Slacktivist's exploration of the Left Behind novels if you're into that.) But they typically come from a background where the critic is well-equipped to understand the creator and the work is illuminating as to the creator's thoughts because of a specifically revealing form of bad writing, lack of editorial filtering, or both.
However in this case, discussing things across a decently long span of time and lacking the budget or the ability to track down members of the production, asking someone to identify the root causes of the issues they're discussing is unreasonable of you. It's also (again) not something that artistic criticism usually does because we're not usually interested in it but rather whether we should spend our money on this object, or should usually be required to do, because there is no guarantee that anyone in the production will talk lest they be perceived as talking out of school.
As has been evidenced in here, people see 'feminist' and move on, so even though she is making valid points, people will automatically assume conflict of interest unless some attempt is made to moderate that viewpoint.
You can't be Writing Women Badly without Writing Badly.
Going back to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl example again, in the process of making the feminist case for why it is bad you also make an excellent case that it is simply bad to create such a character in general, as their actions are inhuman and their motivations bizarre. It is only the fact that such characters are almost (or) always female that makes the criticism feminist. (Because making women act in inhuman and bizarre ways implies women are inhuman and bizarre, natch.)
The viewpoint indicates that a certain kind of Writing Badly is being addressed. A similar kind of focused on-a-particular-set-of-issues criticism can be made in a lot of ways. I could start a Militarist Criticism movement where I examine a work every week for its failure to understand military or para-/pseudo-military structure when dealing with such. Or a Policist Criticism movement. You get the idea.
Looking for a specific form of failure is specialization, and it's up to the audience to apply their own critical thinking skills when coping with any criticism. If they are unwilling, that reflects poorly on them, not on the critic.
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Feminism doesn't target men, it targets the gender system, the patriarchy - a system which hurts both men and women.
Yes, but the moment you place a label on yourself you automatically isolate yourself from certain other groups, the problem is the label and its (inaccurate) connotations to certain people, even some feminists blur that line occasionally, often through frustration at the lack of progress.
This sounds like some kind of narrative evopsych and so I have to caution you that it's probably a terrific oversimplification.
It's a vast oversimplification, I agree, it completely misses out stuff like the effects of male-dominated censorship, religious influence etc over the centuries, but it's a short enough summary of what happened whilst being deficient of almost every detail.
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I don't know if it is, though. I don't think hunter-gatherer societies were the model or ur-prototype for our gender system today, and even if some of them were, which ones? These societies are enormously diverse in the way they handle gender.
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Stop that, it's annoying.
Stop assuming that just because I try to quote only the core portions of why your argument doesn't work, I'm not attempting to addressing your argument as a whole...and we've got a deal!
Because the core of an apple without the flesh isn't a whole apple.
Basically, it's easy to point a finger at 'men'
This is a viewer assumption. Plenty of people have worked to perpetuate these stereotypes, a decent number of them were women (take the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing, most are usually considered romantic movies and if what comprises at least half of their target audience stopped seeing them they'd be a lot less viable). Everyone is getting called out here.
I'll refer you to the answer I gave Battuta, it's more a question of the affect labels have, there's a writer out there who got so fed up with his covers that he started posing in similar get-up :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21033708
He's not doing it because he is anything, he just found the covers annoying more than degrading, and started to show how silly they looked when the female character was replaced with a male one.
and say "You're doing it wrong!", but how many people, at the end of the day, are going to pay attention to that?
It's especially not valid when it comes to artistic criticism. Ebert's job was not to speculate on the causes of why a movie was terrible, but to tell you why it was terrible.
This deals with "art". Movies. Video games. It is artistic criticism. Eurogamer and RPS don't tell you, and typically don't even know, why a game turned out the way it did. All they can do is report on the finished product.
Now, I've read some criticisms that do attempt to explore why the work the in question is terrible. (I highly recommend Slacktivist's exploration of the Left Behind novels if you're into that.) But they typically come from a background where the critic is well-equipped to understand the creator and the work is illuminating as to the creator's thoughts because of a specifically revealing form of bad writing, lack of editorial filtering, or both.
However in this case, discussing things across a decently long span of time and lacking the budget or the ability to track down members of the production, asking someone to identify the root causes of the issues they're discussing is unreasonable of you. It's also (again) not something that artistic criticism usually does because we're not usually interested in it but rather whether we should spend our money on this object, or should usually be required to do, because there is no guarantee that anyone in the production will talk lest they be perceived as talking out of school.
I don't think the work is terrible really, I just have concerns as to its impact because people will assume a lack of impartiality.
As has been evidenced in here, people see 'feminist' and move on, so even though she is making valid points, people will automatically assume conflict of interest unless some attempt is made to moderate that viewpoint.
You can't be Writing Women Badly without Writing Badly.
Going back to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl example again, in the process of making the feminist case for why it is bad you also make an excellent case that it is simply bad to create such a character in general, as their actions are inhuman and their motivations bizarre. It is only the fact that such characters are almost (or) always female that makes the criticism feminist. (Because making women act in inhuman and bizarre ways implies women are inhuman and bizarre, natch.)
The viewpoint indicates that a certain kind of Writing Badly is being addressed. A similar kind of focused on-a-particular-set-of-issues criticism can be made in a lot of ways. I could start a Militarist Criticism movement where I examine a work every week for its failure to understand military or para-/pseudo-military structure when dealing with such. Or a Policist Criticism movement. You get the idea.
Looking for a specific form of failure is specialization, and it's up to the audience to apply their own critical think skills when coping with any criticism. If they are unwilling, that reflects poorly on them, not on the critic.
Possibly, but I do think that those that know this kind of attitude in modern media is wrong will understand her message and those that do not, will not and would not listen anyway.
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I'll refer you to the answer I gave Battuta, it's more a question of the affect labels have, there's a writer out there who got so fed up with his covers that he started posing in similar get-up :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21033708
He's not doing it because he is anything, he just found the covers annoying more than degrading, and started to show how silly they looked when the female character was replaced with a male one.
No, this is 100% wrong. He's doing it because he thinks the covers are disempowering and he's a feminist. Him on the topic:
Way back in the beginning of 2012 when I started doing this cover pose thing, the idea was to take the poses many female characters are contorted into for book covers, and to find a way to highlight exactly how ridiculous and impractical they were. And also to have fun. I definitely wanted it to be fun. I followed up with a continuation of the discussion, looking at the fact that yes, men are sexualized and objectified too, but not in the same ways. Men’s poses are almost always less physically awkward, more “action-ready,” and more powerful.
When I started the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation cover pose fundraiser, I saw it as 1) a way to take something fun and do more of it while supporting a great cause, and 2) a way to continue pointing out problematic poses on our book covers.
The trouble is, I didn’t spend much time introducing and contextualizing the Cover Pose Tradition at the start of the fundraiser. And when we did the first Scalzi/Hines pose-off, while I plugged the fundraiser, I didn’t provide any context at all for why we were doing this.
For my regular readers, that shouldn’t be a problem. But the Scalzi/Hines piece got a lot of press from places like Fark and Boing-Boing, meaning a lot of folks came in and saw two SF/F authors dressing up/posing like women for charity. And some of the reaction began to shift from, “I say, those poses seem remarkably impractical, and how exactly does one do that without dislocating one’s ankle?” to “Hey, guys dressing or posing like girls are both ugly and hilarious!”
This is on me. My blog, my fundraiser, my responsibility. It’s not like I’m unaware of John’s internet appeal and the likely results of our pose-off. (Though even so, the response was bigger than I could have imagined, and I appreciate that – thank you.) But I was caught up in the excitement of raising a lot of money for a good cause, and the flat-out fun of competing with a goofy and good-natured friend. So I didn’t think enough about how this might all come across, nor did I take the time to introduce and contextualize what we were doing.
I apologize for that mistake.
Both John and I had fun with this. Speaking for myself, I want you to laugh at the absurdity of these poses. Sure, one of the reasons I use props like butter knives and giant teddy bears is because I’m cheap and don’t want to pay for real props. But another reason is that I want to encourage the laughter.
I can handle good-natured ribbing, too. I know that when I post these pictures, I can expect an email from my brother asking me to reimburse him for another five years of therapy. I know where that’s coming from, and I’ll get him back soon enough.
But if you’re laughing because you’re a straight guy and therefore must declare all male bodies brain-searingly ugly? If you’re laughing because you think a man in a dress is funny and should be mocked? In other words, if you’re laughing because of various aspects of ingrained sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discriminatory nonsense? Then you’ve missed the point so badly it’s not even funny.
e: He even cancelled an AMA on Reddit because, well, it was on Reddit.
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I don't know if it is, though. I don't think hunter-gatherer societies were the model or ur-prototype for our gender system today, and even if some of them were, which ones? These societies are enormously diverse in the way they handle gender.
Even if we didn't originate from them, we sure pinched stuff from each other. I think that the diversification of societies is part of the reason why there is such a broad span of roles, from Warrior Queen to Damsel in Distress. The trick is finding out why games writers continually pick from the Damsel in Distress side of the scales, and I do think the answer to that is in the number of men in the games industry, not because they are ignorant or sexist, but because they have a lot more idea about how to write a story about a Damsel in Distress than a Warrior Queen. More female writers are definitely needed in the Games Industry.
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I'll refer you to the answer I gave Battuta, it's more a question of the affect labels have, there's a writer out there who got so fed up with his covers that he started posing in similar get-up :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21033708
He's not doing it because he is anything, he just found the covers annoying more than degrading, and started to show how silly they looked when the female character was replaced with a male one.
No, this is 100% wrong. He's doing it because he thinks the covers are disempowering and he's a feminist. Him on the topic:
Way back in the beginning of 2012 when I started doing this cover pose thing, the idea was to take the poses many female characters are contorted into for book covers, and to find a way to highlight exactly how ridiculous and impractical they were. And also to have fun. I definitely wanted it to be fun. I followed up with a continuation of the discussion, looking at the fact that yes, men are sexualized and objectified too, but not in the same ways. Men’s poses are almost always less physically awkward, more “action-ready,” and more powerful.
When I started the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation cover pose fundraiser, I saw it as 1) a way to take something fun and do more of it while supporting a great cause, and 2) a way to continue pointing out problematic poses on our book covers.
The trouble is, I didn’t spend much time introducing and contextualizing the Cover Pose Tradition at the start of the fundraiser. And when we did the first Scalzi/Hines pose-off, while I plugged the fundraiser, I didn’t provide any context at all for why we were doing this.
For my regular readers, that shouldn’t be a problem. But the Scalzi/Hines piece got a lot of press from places like Fark and Boing-Boing, meaning a lot of folks came in and saw two SF/F authors dressing up/posing like women for charity. And some of the reaction began to shift from, “I say, those poses seem remarkably impractical, and how exactly does one do that without dislocating one’s ankle?” to “Hey, guys dressing or posing like girls are both ugly and hilarious!”
This is on me. My blog, my fundraiser, my responsibility. It’s not like I’m unaware of John’s internet appeal and the likely results of our pose-off. (Though even so, the response was bigger than I could have imagined, and I appreciate that – thank you.) But I was caught up in the excitement of raising a lot of money for a good cause, and the flat-out fun of competing with a goofy and good-natured friend. So I didn’t think enough about how this might all come across, nor did I take the time to introduce and contextualize what we were doing.
I apologize for that mistake.
Both John and I had fun with this. Speaking for myself, I want you to laugh at the absurdity of these poses. Sure, one of the reasons I use props like butter knives and giant teddy bears is because I’m cheap and don’t want to pay for real props. But another reason is that I want to encourage the laughter.
I can handle good-natured ribbing, too. I know that when I post these pictures, I can expect an email from my brother asking me to reimburse him for another five years of therapy. I know where that’s coming from, and I’ll get him back soon enough.
But if you’re laughing because you’re a straight guy and therefore must declare all male bodies brain-searingly ugly? If you’re laughing because you think a man in a dress is funny and should be mocked? In other words, if you’re laughing because of various aspects of ingrained sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discriminatory nonsense? Then you’ve missed the point so badly it’s not even funny.
So he is, interesting, but I still prefer his manner of getting his message across, satire can often work a lot more effectively. And, whether it's pallatable or not, a man doing it is far more likely to have an impact on those who would pay no attention to these videos.
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Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin
Noun
feminism (countable and uncountable; plural feminisms)
[...]
2. A social theory or political movement arguing that legal and social restrictions on females must be removed in order to bring about equality of both sexes in all aspects of public and private life.
Yes, how dangerous...
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And here we go again with the few words from the sentence interpreted as the whole....
As I said in the statement you took those few words from, the reason in isolation they become dangerous is because men and women do not live in isolation, they interact, and most couples work out a decent enough compromise purely by being in each others vicinity. More women do need to be in positions where they can influence these attitudes in media, of that there is little doubt, but the solution won't come merely from standpoints, it will come from communication as well.
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There is no such thing as feminism in isolation. Feminism is an attempt to render the gender system egalitarian. 'Feminism in isolation' is a meaningless statement.
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And here we go again with the few words from the sentence interpreted as the whole....
As I said in the statement you took those few words from, the reason in isolation they become dangerous is because men and women do not live in isolation, they interact, and most couples work out a decent enough compromise purely by being in each others vicinity. More women do need to be in positions where they can influence these attitudes in media, of that there is little doubt, but the solution won't come merely from standpoints, it will come from communication as well.
She managed to squeeze eight pages of discussion from this board alone ;)
The thing is, she's right in what she says, but then, in stories, everything is a caricature, not all scientists wear white coats and talk like Brains from Thunderbirds, not all soldiers have an IQ that seems to alternate from 'Hur-Hur he said "penetrate"' to 'I'm relabrating the Nanotech fibres now.. with my teeth!', often in the same soldier.
She's also right that it is the trope that is the problem, the 'maiden in distress' is one of the oldest, most deeply ingrained tropes out there, that'll take a lot to shift.
Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
I'm not seeing it.
There's stuff about needing to talk about causes, which I addressed. That appears to be thrust of that paragraph. There's also things about stories being caricatures and scientists not wearing labcoats and an acknowledgement of her fundamental correctness.
And a suggestion that "two sides of the same coin" but that does not remotely express complex ideas of communication or more women in position to influence decisions or a working fiction of equality interpersonal relations. (The first of which is a gimmie and the other two of which are at best irrelevant to the discussion and at worst illustrative of why feminism is necessary. Or in other words, interpersonal relationships can easily be poisoned by this problem and even though there is an excess of men in the profession of storycrafting there is no reason why they should not all be capable of writing nuanced and lifelike portrayals of women.)
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Of course there's such a thing as feminism in isolation, isolation does not mean they are living in a complete vacuum, only that it's possible to become so focused on one aspect of feminism that it is no longer viewed as a whole. Feminism itself is a perfectly good and healthy concept to follow, but live in a bubble, become too obsessed with the idea that men don't want an equal society (and that's one that could be argued over for hours) and you start to isolate yourself from the mainstream, communication becomes soured with the belief that it is men, not patriarchal society that is the 'enemy'.
Trust me, I worked for several years for someone who believed being a feminist was openly declaring all men to be 'born liars' at every available opportunity. That's not real feminism by any degree, but it is what those frustrations can become if allowed to exist in isolation.
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That's as much feminism as the Soviet Union's economic policy was communism.
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Exactly, but this was a woman who had worked for local government for nearly 40 years, right through the 70's etc when male-dominated workplaces were incredibly sexist in nature, so in many ways her experiences were not dissimilar to many who take up the mantle of feminist, but her reaction to it is the sort of thing that gives proper feminism such a bad name.
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That's as much feminism as the Soviet Union's economic policy was communism.
Weren't there a lot of communist parties which were officially supportive of Soviet economic policies? This kind of sounds like a no true Scotsman to me: OK, then, that woman wasn't a true feminist; but she was calling herself a feminist, other people evidently thought she was a feminist. I think it's fair to include her in "the feminist movement", if you're going to talk about such a nebulous group in the first place.
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I spent about 5 minutes trying to phrase this as a No True Scotsman argument but I'm not sure it is. I can see why Battuta would be against such a person claiming she is a feminist when she quite clearly doesn't believe in equality.
However...
That's as much feminism as the Soviet Union's economic policy was communism.
c.f my post about man-hating feminists and Westbro Baptist. Both feminists and Soviet Communists self-identify themselves using that name.
Arguing that she's not an example of "feminism in isolation" as Flipside put it, is fine if you give him another term to use in its place. If you don't you're basically making a rather pointless semantics argument.
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I guess you could call her a misandrist. It's hardly a no true Scotsman argument. There are radical feminists (Dworkin) who might have some pretty nasty things to say about men in modern culture, but 'men are liars/evil/wrong' is not a tenet of feminism.
Of course you're bumping into a broader philosophical problem here of how to define an entity.
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Of course you're bumping into a broader philosophical problem here of how to define an entity.
Yes but given the entire last page of the debate has basically been about this exact problem.....
This all started with someone getting upset at 666maslo666's comment about "Man-hating feminists" but instead of simply saying that misandrist is a better term since these people are really not feminists everyone lined up to deliberately misunderstand his point and act like there is no such thing.
Then when Flipside uses the term "feminism in isolation" for the same behaviour, the exact same thing happens again. Even though clear examples have been posted of the kind of behaviour under discussion.
If people weren't being so deliberately confrontational about minor semantic points, the entire last page of the discussion need not have happened.
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I guess we would need to be very precise about what, exactly, it's isolated from, but I read it as 'feminism isolated from men', which is a nonsensical statement - feminism goes beyond 'making women better, at any cost'; it's about undoing a toxic gender structure that encompasses all genders and both biological sexes. 'Masculinism' is not a meaningful binary to 'feminism' since 'feminism' doesn't mean 'advancing the cause of women'.
They're not all minor semantic points. A huge part of the anti-feminist backlash of the past 20 years has been an effort to redefine 'feminist' as 'man-hater' or 'female chauvinist'.
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A huge part of the anti-feminist backlash of the past 20 years has been an effort to redefine 'feminist' as 'man-hater' or 'female chauvinist'.
I know, but to act like they don't exist actually helps the anti-feminist backlash. It makes it seem as though that is the secret agenda of feminism when people act like there are no people who claim to be feminists who are actually man-haters. All an anti-feminist needs to do is wait until someone claims that there are no man-haters and then post a link to someone claiming that all men are rapists when they have sex with women.
You can make a very good argument that Westbro Baptist have such an intolerant view of the world that they aren't Christians. You could back that argument up. Problem is that you're never going to succeed in convincing people. They self-identify as Christians and most of their beliefs are ones that fit within the sphere of Christian beliefs even if they are extreme.
Which is why no one tries to make that argument. Instead people simply point out that they are fundamentalists. Idiots. Extremists. Not representative of mainstream Christianity. And that's an argument people will easily accept.
The lunatic fringe needs to be held up as not being representative of feminism. Trying to deny that they are feminists when they self-identify as such is an uphill battle that doesn't really need to be fought. Calling them fundamentalists or extremists instead would quickly point out that although they may at times sound like a mainstream feminist on some issues, they most definitely are not.
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These are labels defined and applied by humans. If someone says 'I am a feminist' and I, a feminist, don't think they're a feminist, I say they're not a feminist, and I appeal to the definition of feminism as I understand it. As far as I am concerned, there are no man-hating feminists, and the feminists I know and read would agree. We are talking about this on a forum as a way to make that clear to people who don't understand why feminism is not about misandry.
I don't buy the WBC analogy. If WBC denied the existence of Christ they would probably have a hard time making anyone believe they were Christians even if they self-identified as such. 'Man haters' are not extremist or fundamentalist feminists because they do not take feminist beliefs to an extreme or adhere to some hard-line fundamental form of feminism. They simply are not feminists; they do not engage with or participate in the basic project of feminism.
Mainstream feminists are generally assumed to be man-haters, thanks to some very successful PR over the past two decades. Disentangling the two and making it clear why they are not compatible ideologies - why, indeed, feminism benefits men - is a critical project.
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Well I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I think by trying to argue that they aren't feminists you help the PR against feminism more than advance your cause.
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I don't buy the WBC analogy. If WBC denied the existence of Christ they would probably have a hard time making anyone believe they were Christians even if they self-identified as such.
Exactly! "Feminism" is a word with a clear-cut definition; misandrists clearly fall outside of that definition, because they aren't trying to bring about equality of the sexes. "Christian", on the other hand, is a word with a lot of ambiguity, meaning different things to different people (which results in falling back on the literal definition, as in your example).
Mostly, if someone self-identifies as "Christian", you pretty much just have to take their word for it. If someone self-identifies as "feminist", though, there's a clear-cut definition of the word we can look at, and see whether or not they fit that definition.
It's almost (but not really) like claiming to be a rock, or a tree. You can claim it all you want, but everyone else is free to disagree, because that's not what those words mean.
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Just like a chauvinist is a belligerent patriot obsessed with glory, and not a woman hater you mean?
The problem is that the people define the meaning of the words, not vice versa. Feminism is in danger, partly by accident, partly by patriarchal design, of having it's meaning misinterpreted. It happens widely, and the more popularised the more extreme ends of feminism is, the more that meaning will be change in the eyes of the public.
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His point isn't that there are no issues, it's that nobody thinks of this dogma that she's spouting when making games. Games are meant to be fun. Games are meant to please people. They do so. If they don't, they don't make money.
... and are therefore free from criticism? Of course not. What *she* is saying is that the games are made using existing tropes, and the ones most commonly picked are sexist garbage. We can argue how sexist they are, if they can be salvageable, etc. But that kind of conversation only can take place once we acknowledge that the conversation is worth having, which Thunderf00t completely denies.
His criticism is even dumber when he acknowledges that she makes videos "for a market". Well then, if that's your rationale, why are you ****ing criticizing her? According to this dimwit, she's perfectly entitled to make these videos like this because she made a ton of money! Hey, what's your problem, thunderf00t, it's only the market!
What a moron.
As the tropes go, she wants them wiped out. And that's wrong. The Damsel in distress trope is old, but it's still capable of being well used, and you're just stifling creativity if you remove it from a developer's arsenal. Every generation of gamers should be able to enjoy being the hero and saving the girl. That's why Double Dragon got it's remakes, because it's a classic. I haven't heard Double Dragion mentioned in years, but as soon as it came up I thought "Marian". I remembered the girl's name even though you barely see her.
Perhaps she does want them wiped out. Perhaps that's bad. But this is a whole another level conversation that these dimwits are not even willing to let others discuss. To point out these tropes, even if in an exagerated manner, is a very useful thing. It makes us aware of the ideologies that surrounds us everywhere, and how they are incredibly skewed in some manner.
I'll give you that the "bollocks" part was unnecessary. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion, but she's so arrogant, just telling you how you think and how the game makes you think and how you should think, and it doesn't work like that.
Yes, I think ideologies function *exactly* like that, they are subtle and they tell you things, even though you might think they are "stoopid" and "too obvious" for your intelligence and so on. (That's the main reason why advertizing always works, despite all our cynicism towards them, "ahhh as if I'd buy anything just because it showed on tv", yes, yes you will).
Arrogance might be bad, but the level of abuse she got is way over the top. That's unexcusable.
Thing is, if you take feminism in isolation it is dangerous, much as if you take masculinism in isolation, it suggests that we are not two sides of the same coin, it's easy and accurate to say that women don't want to feel like victims, but all it feels to me is that she's sitting in front of a camera saying 'This is wrong, that is wrong', and making no real attempt to identify the cause beyond the assumption that it is because men are doing it.
DANGER! DANGER! FEMINISTS ON THE LOOSE!
What is this ****? She makes videos from the FEMINIST point of view. It's right there on the ****ing name of the channel. What did you expect? A treatise on how men are being victims of this or that? I mean, what the ****.
[/quote]
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That's as much feminism as the Soviet Union's economic policy was communism.
You know, running the risk of derailing this topic, that was communism. Just like today's western countries *are* capitalistic. This stupid idea of communism being a platonic ideal that was never realised is a bull**** way of thinking. "Communism" was enacted in Russia, with all its ideological, technological, social and psychological consequences. You will only be able to rehabilitate communism once you start admitting that Stalinism was one of the strongest and purest renderings of it in the 20th century.
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Admittedly my only source on this is Radio Yerevan jokes, but I'm pretty sure that even the rank and file citizen of the USSR saw communism as something they were working towards in the future (and would probably never reach).
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Communism was ideological. It functions as present (as in building it), as an eye (In the name of it, for it, etc.), as Utopia. Stalinism was the consequence of following this ideology.
According to your semantics, we never actually knew what capitalism is like, and that is patently ridiculous.
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"Feminism" is a word with a clear-cut definition;
Is it? Feminism is defined as movement seeking equality for women. By this definition, extreme feminists that believe men need to be taken down a peg to achieve equality could be considered feminists, at the very least from their own point of view. The definition of feminism is subjective and broad enough to potentially encompass even the crazy ones.
I agree with kara here, the comparison with religious extremists is a good one. And it does not make a good impression at all if feminism, or any sociopolitical movement or ideology for that matter, refuses to admit that it may contain an extremist fringe.
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What is this ****? She makes videos from the FEMINIST point of view. It's right there on the ****ing name of the channel. What did you expect? A treatise on how men are being victims of this or that? I mean, what the ****.
1 : Learn to reply using a more mature approach, it doesn't make you look big when you just start saying '****' all the time, in fact, quite the opposite.
2 : Read the thread, learn what people's positions are before blowing a gasket.
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If we want to take back "feminism" as not being a dirty word, then the label for people who hate men and then claim to be feminist should be "liars."
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Mostly, if someone self-identifies as "Christian", you pretty much just have to take their word for it. If someone self-identifies as "feminist", though, there's a clear-cut definition of the word we can look at, and see whether or not they fit that definition.
It's almost (but not really) like claiming to be a rock, or a tree. You can claim it all you want, but everyone else is free to disagree, because that's not what those words mean.
Okay then, which of the big name so-called feminists are actually misidentified then? Germaine Greer for instance has frequently said that she doesn't believe that her goal is equality with men and on one occasion famously said that all soldiers are rapists if the circumstances are right.
On the basis of that is she not a feminist then?
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I wonder if there isn't a slight case of "Not a Real Scotsman" fallacy going on here.
There are many kinds of people who classify themselves as feminists, but how is feminism defined if not by the people claiming to be feminist?
The radical, man-hating "feminists" are just as much feminists as radical islamists are muslims - neither are truly representative of the people they claim to be part of, and typically the more moderate parts of the movement (in every ideology, it seems) usually tend to try and distance themselves from the most rabid elements.
To which extent this disassociation from the extremists happens usually seems to depend on how disadvantageous the extremists are to the bulk of the movement. With feminism, it seems that most everyone denies that the "man-haters" are not true feminists by any means.
So the question is - is it intellectually honest to say that the most extreme views of an ideology are not true supporters of said ideology? It's a continuous scale, too, rather than a hard division - who gets to decide which level of "harshness" or "fundamentalism" is no longer part of the ideology or religion in question?
I'll grant that my analogy about muslims and islamists is not perfect because it's a vastly more complicated case with muslims and islamists, but I think similarities are significant enough to at least pose the question.
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This discussion is rapidly sliding downhill into analogyville, I see. Please can we stop that.
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I wonder if there isn't a slight case of "Not a Real Scotsman" fallacy going on here.
There are many kinds of people who classify themselves as feminists, but how is feminism defined if not by the people claiming to be feminist?
The radical, man-hating "feminists" are just as much feminists as radical islamists are muslims - neither are truly representative of the people they claim to be part of, and typically the more moderate parts of the movement (in every ideology, it seems) usually tend to try and distance themselves from the most rabid elements.
To which extent this disassociation from the extremists happens usually seems to depend on how disadvantageous the extremists are to the bulk of the movement. With feminism, it seems that most everyone denies that the "man-haters" are not true feminists by any means.
So the question is - is it intellectually honest to say that the most extreme views of an ideology are not true supporters of said ideology? It's a continuous scale, too, rather than a hard division - who gets to decide which level of "harshness" or "fundamentalism" is no longer part of the ideology or religion in question?
I'll grant that my analogy about muslims and islamists is not perfect because it's a vastly more complicated case with muslims and islamists, but I think similarities are significant enough to at least pose the question.
This exact metaphor and reply, right down to the invocation of the Scotsman, happened on, like, the last page.
A lot of Muslims are happy to say that radical Islamists aren't real Muslims. (I think Anwar al-Aulaqi actually said this once, in his pre-radicalization days.) More broadly than that, though, a lot of the questions you're posing just don't have clear cut answers. They're political issues and the outcomes will be determined by political means. I'm of the opinion that most of the association between feminism and, uh, 'misandry' is the outcome of hostile politics, and that the best thing we can do for the underinformed is make it clear that feminism isn't about hurting or disempowering men. That's a political statement and it's going to be pursued politically. Politically politics policy political
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I wonder if there isn't a slight case of "Not a Real Scotsman" fallacy going on here.
Unlikely.
There are outward trappings associated with Islam or Christianity or whatever; prayer in a certain way addressing a certain deity, for example. It has broad-based effects on activities completely unrelated on the surface to the ideas of the core beliefs. Formalized worship and the rituals of it has essentially nothing to do with core tenants of most faiths. The codes of conduct most faiths embrace assemble themselves from what is typically a minority of the contents of their holy works. It is therefore possible to assume the trappings of a religion without embracing a majority of it.
Feminism or misandry deal exclusively in the ideal or proper form of male-female relations. Though this is a broad subject, it does not have trappings; it is complete unto itself and is not reflected by actions peripherally related unto itself. One could be both racist and feminist, insisting that men and women are equal, within their proper racial contexts. Similarly one can be for racial equality, but also for the dominance of women. They are narrowly defined doctrines. It would be difficult to be two religions, or two flavors of a religion.
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Ah, I haven't exactly been keeping up with the topic, apologies if there was repetitive elements in my post.
I wonder if there isn't a slight case of "Not a Real Scotsman" fallacy going on here.
Unlikely.
There are outward trappings associated with Islam or Christianity or whatever; prayer in a certain way addressing a certain deity, for example. It has broad-based effects on activities completely unrelated on the surface to the ideas of the core beliefs. Formalized worship and the rituals of it has essentially nothing to do with core tenants of most faiths. The codes of conduct most faiths embrace assemble themselves from what is typically a minority of the contents of their holy works. It is therefore possible to assume the trappings of a religion without embracing a majority of it.
Feminism or misandry deal exclusively in the ideal or proper form of male-female relations. Though this is a broad subject, it does not have trappings; it is complete unto itself and is not reflected by actions peripherally related unto itself. One could be both racist and feminist, insisting that men and women are equal, within their proper racial contexts. Similarly one can be for racial equality, but also for the dominance of women. They are narrowly defined doctrines. It would be difficult to be two religions, or two flavors of a religion.
Well, that makes sense I guess, but I was more or less speaking about the fact that any ideology or religion or whatever is what its adherents or followers or whatever make it to be - up to a point where a division occurs when some parts of a group no longer wish to be associated with another part of the group, hence forming two separate groups.
That's happened with most religions and ideologies that grew big enough, but in most cases the separated sects are still considered part of the wider entity, like all the different sects and forms of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, etc. etc.
So it's curious to me that somehow people are saying that misandristic feminism is not feminism, and the only true feminism is the form that doesn't seek hurting or disempowering men. Does it really work like that, when almost all other forms of ideologies split from a "main source" are usually still classified as subsets of said main source?
Socialism is another good example, and perhaps less toxic (although I'm not sure if that applies on US soil): Socialism split into communism and social democracy (bolsheviks and menseviks respectively), and communism further formed different subsets such as marxism, leninism, stalinism, trotskyism, maoism, titoism, and who knows what (and depending on who you're talking with, some will also repeat the same argument that this or that is not REAL communism, on the basis that it didn't work, or being a personality cult, or just being against some core tenet of communism in general). But they are still usually treated as being derived from communism.
So the question is, while I understand the desire to disassociate the misandristic feminism from the original meaning, and I fully acknowledge that the two are different enough to be considered separate ideologies - is it really acceptable to outright say "that's not REAL feminism"?
The proponents of that sect of feminism usually tend to think of themselves as feminist, as much as it harms the actual feminist movement to be associated with them. But so far they haven't thought of a term to describe their ideology...
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Could you name any of them?
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dem weasel words
Who do you want me to name? I don't particularly know people of the field, I'm talking about regular people who happen to be misandristic and call themselves feminists. While all my evidence about their existence is anecdotal I'm reasonably sure they do exist.
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They probably exist, though probably not at the frequency Ann Coulter would tell you.
But as for the question of whether or not they're feminists, and who gets to assign this label - what about my responses on the last page would you like to see expanded?
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This?
These are labels defined and applied by humans. If someone says 'I am a feminist' and I, a feminist, don't think they're a feminist, I say they're not a feminist, and I appeal to the definition of feminism as I understand it. As far as I am concerned, there are no man-hating feminists, and the feminists I know and read would agree. We are talking about this on a forum as a way to make that clear to people who don't understand why feminism is not about misandry.
I don't buy the WBC analogy. If WBC denied the existence of Christ they would probably have a hard time making anyone believe they were Christians even if they self-identified as such. 'Man haters' are not extremist or fundamentalist feminists because they do not take feminist beliefs to an extreme or adhere to some hard-line fundamental form of feminism. They simply are not feminists; they do not engage with or participate in the basic project of feminism.
but how can you be feminist when you are not a woman
I agree, there are a lot of people calling themselves (or others) many things, and to quote Inigo Montoya... "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means".
That is, if we assume there is one correct definition for feminism. Or communism. Or any other <insert term here>.
But who is it that gets to determine the terms? Are they subject to memetic (d)evolution, changing their meaning, or should they always stay as a constant reference to what was originally meant by the term?
Mainstream feminists are generally assumed to be man-haters, thanks to some very successful PR over the past two decades. Disentangling the two and making it clear why they are not compatible ideologies - why, indeed, feminism benefits men - is a critical project.
If popular belief is that a word means something different than its original meaning, is it misuse of the word or has the meaning of the word changed?
Who should change the word they are referred to, the man-hater feminists (general assumption) or original feminists (actual meaning of the term)?
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I think my answers are already obvious: words are defined by politics. Politics is achieved through rhetoric, persistence, exposure, and volume. Feminists will reclaim the word feminist by telling people what it means and persuading them to agree with this definition. This is how linguistic politics works.
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I don't think it's quite so simple. I pointed out the example of Germaine Greer's comments on rape by soldiers. Do you now kick her out of the feminist club for that comment?
I don't think that you can make a black and white definition for feminist and separate people into two groups. You're going to get people all along the spectrum from whatever you'd call proper feminists to people like the utter twat I posted. In the middle you're going to get people who are mostly feminists but who occasionally make stupid "All men are bastards!" style comments.
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I think Greer's comment was completely correct. Unless there's something particularly special about British troops, men and women alike in the armed forces are going to rape civilians, each other, and enemy prisoners when deployed for any length of time.
Again, we're touching on the issue of how to define groups. I personally subscribe to the prototypic model used by the human mind, but it's a difficult one to translate to conversation because it runs against our intuitions of how definitions work; it jives well with your last two sentences.
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I think Greer's comment was completely correct. Unless there's something particularly special about British troops, men and women alike in the armed forces are going to rape civilians, each other, and enemy prisoners when deployed for any length of time.
Her comment wasn't that some soldiers will commit rapes. It was that ALL of them would.
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Is this the wording in question?
‘All soldiers in certain circumstances will rape regardless of whether they are ours or theirs or whoevers.’
This doesn't sound like a massively unreasonable statement to me, depending on how you read 'soldiers'. I don't think it makes sense if it's extended to Literally Every Individual Soldier, but read as 'soldiers, regardless of national affiliation' it seems like realism. And there's no question that most people - soldiers or not - will do absolutely barbaric things if put in the right situation, especially one that involves dehumanization and hierarchy.
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Let's assume the Literally Every Individual Soldier interpretation. That might be doing Germaine a disservice but it makes my point quite nicely. If someone who is a feminist says something like that, do they suddenly stop being a feminist?
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I think it makes them quite a misanthrope given the number of women in the armed forces. But let's say that yeah, she said 'Literally ever man in the military is going to commit a rape if put in the right circumstances', and if 'right circumstances' were clearly meant as something other than a Milgram or Zimbardoesque dehumanization situation (in which case most people on Earth would probably be able to commit a rape). Then yeah, if I heard her I'd say that isn't a feminist statement; I think it's ridiculous to assert that all men in the military are just waiting for their chance. That's the kind of hostility and essentialism that's anathema to feminism.
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Yeah but we now have a person who has years of writing saying she's a feminist suddenly being called something else. And if with that exception she continues to produce feminist material, it's very hard to get away with refuting that she is a feminist.
My point is that if you say that as time past her views have been come more extreme / more fundamentalist you can point out that although some of her views do agree with mainstream feminism while others don't. Same as you can with a fundamentalist of a religion. If you try to repeatedly claim that she isn't a feminist, you have a problem when someone points out that all her other views are the same as a feminists.
It's like trying to claim someone isn't a Christian because by hating gays they are anathema to Christ's message of tolerance. In too many other ways they sound like a Christian.
As I said, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this point.
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It's not a religion or a medical condition. If you've been a feminist for years and you say something that doesn't make sense from a feminist POV, you're someone who's been a feminist for years who is not being a particularly great feminist right now. If you've been a Christian for years and suddenly you start spouting anti-gay rhetoric, you're not being a particularly great Christian any more. You've ceased to act in accordance with the label.
I don't think the extreme/fundamentalist metaphor works for me. I think this is an issue of coarseness of labeling and definition, more philosophical than anything particular to feminism (or any other political stance).
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Alternatively, we could say that if a movement that is described as having Egalitarianism as its goal, but is focused mainly on addressing the huge assymetries against women placed in our lives because of the patriarchal system (and has in its very name the focus of one gender) will necessarily bring about some equivocation within its members.
Take this woman who makes her feminist frequency videos. Despite me agreeing with them mostly, I must do so while only focusing on the feministic side of things. If I expect an "egalitarian" criticism, where she would also point out where men are being wrongly portrayed by the "patriarchal" system and so on, I'd be hugely disappointed with them.
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His point isn't that there are no issues, it's that nobody thinks of this dogma that she's spouting when making games. Games are meant to be fun. Games are meant to please people. They do so. If they don't, they don't make money.
... and are therefore free from criticism? Of course not. What *she* is saying is that the games are made using existing tropes, and the ones most commonly picked are sexist garbage. We can argue how sexist they are, if they can be salvageable, etc. But that kind of conversation only can take place once we acknowledge that the conversation is worth having, which Thunderf00t completely denies.
His criticism is even dumber when he acknowledges that she makes videos "for a market". Well then, if that's your rationale, why are you ****ing criticizing her? According to this dimwit, she's perfectly entitled to make these videos like this because she made a ton of money! Hey, what's your problem, thunderf00t, it's only the market!
What a moron.
As the tropes go, she wants them wiped out. And that's wrong. The Damsel in distress trope is old, but it's still capable of being well used, and you're just stifling creativity if you remove it from a developer's arsenal. Every generation of gamers should be able to enjoy being the hero and saving the girl. That's why Double Dragon got it's remakes, because it's a classic. I haven't heard Double Dragion mentioned in years, but as soon as it came up I thought "Marian". I remembered the girl's name even though you barely see her.
Perhaps she does want them wiped out. Perhaps that's bad. But this is a whole another level conversation that these dimwits are not even willing to let others discuss. To point out these tropes, even if in an exagerated manner, is a very useful thing. It makes us aware of the ideologies that surrounds us everywhere, and how they are incredibly skewed in some manner.
I'll give you that the "bollocks" part was unnecessary. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion, but she's so arrogant, just telling you how you think and how the game makes you think and how you should think, and it doesn't work like that.
Yes, I think ideologies function *exactly* like that, they are subtle and they tell you things, even though you might think they are "stoopid" and "too obvious" for your intelligence and so on. (That's the main reason why advertizing always works, despite all our cynicism towards them, "ahhh as if I'd buy anything just because it showed on tv", yes, yes you will).
Arrogance might be bad, but the level of abuse she got is way over the top. That's unexcusable.
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Hi Luis.
I'm surprised you called that Thunderf00t guy a moron. I thought you liked him. Maybe not anymore...
I think he just thinks she is 100% wrong. Now I don't know the guy, but you seemed to think he was intelligent before this, so I'd be surprised if he thought the actual conversation wasn't worth having. Did he ever say she wasn't entitled to making them? I can't remember now, it's been a while since I watched it, but I certainly don't oppose her right to make them. Especially when people have paid for them.
These people that attacked her with the abuse campaign, I certainly oppose them. They are fools, and I'm sure they contributed a great deal to the money she got in her kickstarter campaign by way of sympathy. Nice going fools. You helped her. All you did was put money in her pocket and strengthen her resolve.
How do you feel about wiping these tropes out entirely? I'm sure that's what she wants.
You know advertising never works on me. I decide what I want and seek it out. Others don't decide for me. I know it does work on others though. But advertising is overt, not subtle. It is focused and targetted. The message is clear.
As I've always said, the abuse was wrong. Terrible in fact. I'd like to see these people punished. But that shouldn't stop people who aren't abusive from having an opinion in opposition to hers, just as it shouldn't stop her being able to voice hers, despite me strongly disagreeing with it.
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No I don't think he was intelligent before this and now he's a moron. I just used the word moron because he likes to use it quite a lot. I do however think that whenever the theme of "Feminism" comes up, he just goes almost full retard, and that's sad to watch.
And of course, I applaud the fact that everyone has their own opinion. It's just that it's amazingly stupid to be hypocritical about it.
TF says that Anita cannot criticize games because they have a MARKET. Is this the dumbest argument ever? Specially considering she made a ton of money on her new series in Kickstarter? I mean, if that's an argument, then logic dictates that TF should *NOT* criticize Anita.
Another level of hypocrisy is the sheer amount of blindness he is engaged with when he claims that she has to prove that sexism in games have consequences in our real lives. Because violence in games don't have good evidence, sexism might have even less.
OK, now work this out. Sexism in games is alright because Violence is also right. Why not racism? Why should we not accept games that were racist, from this ridiculous point of view? "Heck, Anita, you can't prove that these Racist games are effecting society, therefore don't tell me these are dangerous things that we should not enjoy!"
See how abhorrent arguing like this really is?
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No I don't think he was intelligent before this and now he's a moron. I just used the word moron because he likes to use it quite a lot. I do however think that whenever the theme of "Feminism" comes up, he just goes almost full retard, and that's sad to watch.
And of course, I applaud the fact that everyone has their own opinion. It's just that it's amazingly stupid to be hypocritical about it.
TF says that Anita cannot criticize games because they have a MARKET. Is this the dumbest argument ever? Specially considering she made a ton of money on her new series in Kickstarter? I mean, if that's an argument, then logic dictates that TF should *NOT* criticize Anita.
Another level of hypocrisy is the sheer amount of blindness he is engaged with when he claims that she has to prove that sexism in games have consequences in our real lives. Because violence in games don't have good evidence, sexism might have even less.
OK, now work this out. Sexism in games is alright because Violence is also right. Why not racism? Why should we not accept games that were racist, from this ridiculous point of view? "Heck, Anita, you can't prove that these Racist games are effecting society, therefore don't tell me these are dangerous things that we should not enjoy!"
See how abhorrent arguing like this really is?
Alright.
I'm sure he means the games are catering to their market. She is catering to her market. She doesn't like the games, he doesn't like her opinion. But neither are in the target market of the other.
But we're not talking overt sexism. At least not in the case of the Damsel in Distress trope. Back in the depths of this thread I said that I thought the real problem was all the scantily clad pretty girls you see in games these days, and Anita is supposedly going to make a video on it. I might end up agreeing with that one if it comes.
An overtly racist game would be bad. But racism as an element of a story would not.
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No of course not. The brilliant "Walking Dead" game touches on racism quite a lot and in a marvelous way.
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Was it here or in that other thread where the "we have to be sexist because those horrible prejudiced white males we market everything to just wouldn't be able to stomach strong female characters" argument was pointed out as being a self-perpetuating myth with a healthy dose of psychological projection?
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No of course not. The brilliant "Walking Dead" game touches on racism quite a lot and in a marvelous way.
I haven't played it. I looked into it a little, and it seems the game is played on quick time events, so I wouldn't like that. If it had been a kind of co-op survival/shooter game with AI team mates and strong story, I'd have seriously considered a purchase. As it is, I think it would be good to watch an LP of it, I haven't really encountered racism in games before outside of fictional races racism.
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Was it here or in that other thread where the "we have to be sexist because those horrible prejudiced white males we market everything to just wouldn't be able to stomach strong female characters" argument was pointed out as being a self-perpetuating myth with a healthy dose of psychological projection?
I don't know but it should be in every thread.
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It is, of course, here (http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/). The thing that most annoys me is that the people blaming the depiction of women in games as being the result of the market power of the nebulous (but obviously bigoted) Young Male Gamer Demographic are more often than not young male gamers themselves; so whatever they think they're achieving by diverting the blame from the industry to themselves, I haven't a clue.
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I'm sure he means the games are catering to their market.
As I observed in this thread before, you can't be Writing Women Badly without Writing Badly.
Even if approached from a purely quality-of-the-work standpoint, sexism typically drags the game down by applying strange and inhuman thoughts, behaviors, and actions to people in the game. Everyone aspires to make something good, to play something good. This makes sexist portrayals more akin to foot-bullet than any market demographic to be catered to.
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I'm sure he means the games are catering to their market.
As I observed in this thread before, you can't be Writing Women Badly without Writing Badly.
Even if approached from a purely quality-of-the-work standpoint, sexism typically drags the game down by applying strange and inhuman thoughts, behaviors, and actions to people in the game. Everyone aspires to make something good, to play something good. This makes sexist portrayals more akin to foot-bullet than any market demographic to be catered to.
Indeed. The best-written female characters appear in the best-written games. You typically do not find a well-written game with atrocious female characters, nor do you typically find well-written female characters in atrociously-written games.
I keep reading this thread, but I've been away for a few days and having just gotten caught up I'm not entirely convinced I want to re-engage in much more depth.